Perspectives on International Political Theory in Europe (Trends in European IR Theory) 303077273X, 9783030772734

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TRENDS IN EUROPEAN IR THEORY SERIES EDITORS: KNUD ERIK JØRGENSEN · AUDREY ALEJANDRO ALEXANDER REICHWEIN · FELIX RÖSCH · HELEN TURTON

Perspectives on International Political Theory in Europe Edited by Vassilios Paipais

Trends in European IR Theory

Series Editors Knud Erik Jørgensen, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Audrey Alejandro, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK Alexander Reichwein, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Giessen, Germany Felix Rösch, Coventry University, Coventry, UK Helen Turton, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

A series of 9 select Palgrave Pivots that together will provide concise accounts of IR theoretical traditions in Europe and the historical and theoretical roots that European IR currently is missing. The series will provide a theoretical backbone for the IR discipline and define and strengthen the identity of European IR theory. Each Pivot in the series will constitute and reconstruct IR theoretical traditions in Europe (Liberalism, Realism, English School, International Political Economy, International Political Theory, Feminism, and the post-positivist tradition including constructivism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism and critical theory), and a concluding volume will look back and summarise the advances (and missed opportunities) of the discipline in the 20th century, all following an initial framework volume setting the scene and providing the rationale. As a theoretical tradition is nothing without theorists to produce, reproduce and transform it, the individual volumes will necessarily focus on the contributions of individual theorists, a feature that will provide the series with a unique edge, and covering the main characteristics of each tradition that is sorely missing. But more than just providing roots, the series will have a critical integrative function. In order to achieve this aim, the projects will take a transnational perspective, going beyond the sociology of knowledge studies that so far has been predominantly national in its orientation. Each Pivot will be kept as close as possible to a common length and shared structure; the volumes will be developed individually yet with a very clear common thread and thus appear as an exclusive collection. Individual volumes will have a largely identical structure which the editorial committee will define and enforce.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15636

Vassilios Paipais Editor

Perspectives on International Political Theory in Europe

Editor Vassilios Paipais School of International Relations University of St Andrews St Andrews, UK

Trends in European IR Theory ISBN 978-3-030-77273-4 ISBN 978-3-030-77274-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77274-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Détail de la Tour Eiffel © nemesis2207/Fotolia.co.uk This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

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Introduction: International Political Theory as a European Theoretical Tradition Vassilios Paipais The European Image of the World as a Cosmos: Notes Towards an Archaeology Gideon Baker

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Reason of State in European International Thought Richard Devetak

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Aesthetic Approaches to International Political Theory Roberto Farneti

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Democratic Peace as a Horizon of Expectation: Liberalism and Pluralism Revisited Leonie Holthaus

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Practice Approaches in International Political Theory Maren Hofius

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Justice and Injustice in International Political Theory Regina Kreide

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European International Political Theory as a New Critical Theory of World Politics: The Instructive Case of Jean Baudrillard Spiros Makris

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Gideon Baker is Associate Professor in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Queensland. His background is in political philosophy and he has published on cosmopolitanism, ethics in International Relations, political theology, and nihilism in the history of Western thought. His most recent book, Nihilism and Philosophy: Nothingness, Truth and World, was published with Bloomsbury Academic in 2018. He has recently completed a research project on questioning in the Western philosophical tradition. Richard Devetak is Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Queensland. His research focuses on the history of international thought, history of the states-system, and critical theories of international relations. His publications include articles in History of European Ideas, International Affairs, International Theory, and Review of International Studies, and a recent book on Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2018). Roberto Farneti is Associate Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of Economics and Management of the University of Bolzano. A Political Theorist specializing in the Theory of International Relations and the History of Political Thought, Roberto has had visiting research

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and teaching posts at the University of California, Los Angeles (2003– 2005), Columbia University (2003), Oxford University (2000), and Brown University (2000). He has been the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers at the Exzellenzcluster on “Normative Orders” of the J.W. Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main. He has contributed articles to several academic journals, including Critical Inquiry and the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Maren Hofius is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair of Political Science, especially Global Governance at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, and a Research Fellow at the Institute for European Integration—Europa-Kolleg Hamburg. She is the Editor of the Springer book series ‘Frontiers in International Relations’ and interested in international practice theory, constructivist norms research, and diplomacy. Her article ‘Community at the Border or the Boundaries of Community? The case of EU Field Diplomats’ was awarded the 2017 BISA Best Article in Review in International Studies (RIS) prize. Leonie Holthaus is Senior Research Fellow at TU Darmstadt, Germany, and the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” at Frankfurt University, Germany. Her articles have appeared in the European Journal of International Relations, the Review of International Studies, and theInternational History Review. She is the author of Pluralist Democracy in International Relations: L.T. Hobhouse, G.D.H. Cole, and David Mitrany (Basingstoke; Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Regina Kreide is Professor of Political and Social Theory and the History of Ideas at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. She has published widely in international journals on global justice, human rights, international law, democracy, and security, and European minorities. Her most recent book publications include the Habermas-Handbook, together with Hauke Brunkhorst and Cristina Lafont, Columbia UP 2017; Transformation of Democracy: Crisis, Protest, and Legitimation, ed. with R. Celikates and T. Wesche, with Rowman&Littlefield, 2015; The Repressed Democracy 2016 (in German), and The Securitization of the Roma in Europe, (edited with Huub Van Baar and Ana Ivasiuc), Palgrave 2018. Conceptualizing Power in Dynamics of Securitization: Beyond State and International System (ed.) with Andreas Langenohl. Her book Global Justice? (in German) appeared in 2021.

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Spiros Makris is Associate Professor in Political Theory at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK. He is a specialist in modern and contemporary political theory. He has published more than thirty monographs and many peer-review articles in Greek and English. His recent publications in English include: “Jacques Derrida and the Case of Cosmopolitanism: ‘Cities of Refuge’ in the Twenty-First Century” in Darren O’Byrne and Sybille De La Rosa (eds.), The Cosmopolitan Ideal. Challenges and Opportunities (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015); “European Demos, Citizenship and Migrants in a Globalized World: Some Critical Reflections from a Habermasian Perspective” in Marco Caselli and Guia Gilardoni (eds.), Globalization, Supranational Dynamics and Local Experiences (London: Palgrave, 2018); “Politics of Space, Strangeness and Culture in the Global Age” in Barrie Axford, Sandra Halperin, Claudia Lueders (eds.), Political Sociologies of the Cultural Encounter (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). Vassilios Paipais is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in International Relations at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He has published papers on the theological foundations of realist thought in International Relations, on political ontology, and on philosophical and political theology in various leading IR and political theory journals. He is the editor of the 2019 Special Issue “Political Theologies of the International: The Continued Relevance of Theology in International Relations” in the Journal of International Relations and Development, the author of Political Ontology and International Political Thought: Voiding a Pluralist World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and the editor of Theology and World Politics: Metaphysics, Genealogies, Political Theologies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). His edited book Civility and World Order: Beyond Tragedy and Utopianism (Bristol: Bristol University Press) is forthoming in April 2022.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: International Political Theory as a European Theoretical Tradition Vassilios Paipais

Abstract This introduction casts International Political Theory (IPT) not as a narrow niche production at the margins of the discipline of International Relations (IR) but rather as a key dimension of theorising international relations that challenges disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, and geographical boundaries and inseminates other theoretical IR traditions. The chapters in this volume approach IPT as a theoretical tradition that emphasises and interrogates the philosophical, historical, ethical, normative, institutional, and aesthetic dimensions of international relations and world politics. In so doing, they explore IPT as a European theoretical tradition to stress that, paradoxically, it is only by provincialising Europe and its intellectual traditions that one may finally appreciate what is truly universal in them.

V. Paipais (B) School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Paipais (ed.), Perspectives on International Political Theory in Europe, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77274-1_1

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Keywords International Political Theory · Europe · Theorising international relations · Theoretical traditions · Interdisciplinarity

International Political Theory: A Key Dimension of Theorising International Relations International Political Theory (IPT) has known an impressive growth in the last thirty years. Born out of a frustration with the direction IR theory had taken in mainstream positivist circles at the discipline’s hegemonic centres, IPT declared itself from the outset as the meeting place between Political Theory and International Relations. In a recent voluminous Oxford Handbook outlining IPT’s achievements and assessing its prospects, Brown and Eckersley (2018: 3) remind us that ‘IPT studies the “ought” questions that have been ignored or sidelined by the modern study of International Relations, and the “international” dimension that Political Theory has in the past neglected’. But whereas such a definition captures some of IPT’s initial impulse, not everybody agrees on the nature, scope, and character of IPT as a theoretical tradition or approach to theorising the international. In fact, several textbooks have appeared the last twenty-five years that sought to demarcate the field in ways that were sometimes restrictive (Brown, 2002, 2015; Hutchings, 1999) and other times more inclusive, historically sensitive, and thematically pluralistic (Boucher, 1998; Keene, 2004; Lang, 2014). For example, rather than conceptualise IPT merely as a research domain that amounts to little more than ‘Applied Political Philosophy’ or a preoccupation with ‘ethics and international affairs’ in a post-Cold War era, attempts have been made to expand the thematic range of IPT to include the history of international political thought. Eddie Keene’s (2004) introduction stretches back to the advent of modernity and connects IPT with the history of international political thought in the modern era (see also Jahn, 2006; Knutzen, 2016). An even broader historical sensibility is reflected in the collection of ancient, medieval, and modern texts in the Brown et al. (2002) reader, taking an approach that aims to put IPT on the map as a tradition of theorising about the international that harks back to Thucydides. Gradually, therefore, IPT came to be recognised as an inherently interdisciplinary domain of inquiry combining insights from the history of political and international thought, global ethics, political and social

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theory, and IR theory, which, in turn, raised questions about whether it was unnecessarily restrictive to imagine it as merely a subfield of IR. For instance, early custodians of IPT, such as Boucher (1998), Brown (2002), Rengger (2000), and Nardin (2013), envisaged it not merely as a narrow niche production at the margins of IR, but rather as a way of reconnecting IR theory with the wider developments in intellectual history, social and political theory, and moral philosophy. As Terry Nardin (2013: 295) has aptly put it, international political theory connects mainstream international relations theorising with moral questions, with political issues posed by globalisation, and with the history of international thought, including that of non-Western peoples. Its concerns – ethical, institutional and historical – are central to the activity of theorising about international relations.

Similarly, Knud Erik Jørgensen (2010: 33) has described IPT as a peculiar theoretical tradition that seems to be both a domain of research in IR in its own right with its own themes and areas of interest (just war theory, theories of justice, theories of community) and ‘a set of systematic reflections on the normative or ethical dimensions that are present in other theoretical traditions’. Anthony Lang takes it a step further by including within IPT four strands of literature that speak to philosophical, political, legal, and ethical concerns: political theory, International Relations theory, international legal theory, and moral and ethical philosophy. This definition chimes well with Jørgensen’s (2010: 41) intuition that IPT, in the broader sense, is ‘a key dimension of theorising international relations’. Such is more or less the perspective of Brown and Eckersley (2018) too, who reconstruct IPT as a field that cuts across parochial divisions between Political Theory and International Relations theory, normative or interpretive vs. explanatory theory, and critical vs. problem-solving theory. The purpose of this volume then is to celebrate the scope and diversity of IPT not only as a specialised subfield of research in IR, but also as a way of theorising the international that challenges disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, and geographical boundaries. As such, it bears the potential to inseminate other theoretical traditions, from analytical approaches to political theory to philosophical, historical, sociological, and critical/post-positivist approaches to IR. The chapters in this volume,

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therefore, do not principally engage what could be perceived as traditional IPT themes, such as global justice, human rights, just war theory, the ethics of war, or humanitarian intervention, although some of them indirectly do touch on some of those themes. They rather look at IPT as a theoretical tradition that emphasises and interrogates the philosophical, historical, ethical, normative, institutional, and aesthetic dimensions of international relations and world politics.

The Question of ‘Europeanness’ Another critical question that this volume raises is in what way IPT can be seen as a European theoretical tradition of international relations and what that may mean in our current global predicament. It would be a serious understatement to argue that recently, and perhaps quite justifiably so, European ideas, philosophies, and methodologies have come under ferocious attack for serving as the epistemic vehicle of European hegemony over, and exploitation of, the non-European world (Hobson, 2012; Shilliam, 2010). Eurocentrism as the conscious or unconscious marginalisation or dismissal of the historical experiences and epistemic traditions of non-European people has rightfully been questioned and deconstructed by postcolonial and indigenous approaches. At first glance, it would then appear odd or unfashionable, under the current climate, to dedicate an entire volume to the exploration of the diverse ways IPT has been studied in Europe or even trace the European spatial and temporal contexts of those approaches. For the contributors to this volume, however, ‘Europe’ is not merely a geographical region or even a cultural idea, an identity, a historical legacy, or a civilisational entity. It is, of course, all that too since the terrain, within which IPT as a European theoretical tradition and mode of theorising the international emerged and evolved, has already been unevenly structured and determined by specific historical legacies and entrenched intellectual traditions that constitute a cultural frame of reference with specific characteristics. Indeed, the often-remarked family resemblances between the English School’s international society approach and some of the basic themes around which the study IPT has been organised (inside/outside, universal/particular, system/society) in its early years was not accidental and reflected, despite its global scope, Eurocentric priorities and epistemic prejudices (see Brown et al., 2002: 6). The same goes for the more historically minded approaches to IPT that seemed to be

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inspired almost exclusively by the Western canon focusing on the international dimension in the thought of classical European political thinkers (Boucher, 1998; Clark & Neumann, 1996; Jahn, 2006). And yet, while the ongoing epistemic violence of Eurocentrism needs to be acknowledged and resisted, nothing serves the purpose of a critical ‘reschooling’ (Tickner & Blaney, 2013) of our epistemic practices better than confronting ‘Europe ’ itself as a protean and unfixed master signifier, a thought-provoking riddle, and an open question. Without denying or downplaying that much of what is being called ‘European’ is in fact reconstructed and, in many cases, thinly disguised nineteenth-century imperialist ideas (Delanty, 1995), the contributors to this volume engage with the idea of ‘Europe’ as a discursive field of controversy, an agonistic terrain of contestation that may even be envisaged as a meta-community or perhaps, as Makris in his chapter suggests, the name for a new critical globalisation. In this respect, contributions in this volume explore IPT as a European theoretical tradition but they do so merely to stress that, paradoxically, it is only by provincialising Europe and its intellectual traditions that one may finally appreciate what is truly universal in them.

Outline of the Chapters In his chapter, Gideon Baker offers an archaeological investigation into the concept of ‘world’. ‘World’, Baker argues, is clearly fundamental for conceptualisations of international and word order by both liberalcosmopolitan and critical approaches to IPT. But, for Baker, every normative theory of international order, or any critique of that order, is already implicated in metaphysical ontology, namely in the European image of ‘the world’ as a cosmos or an enduring order that can be known. By way of a Nietzsche-inspired genealogy of this ‘true world’ in Plato, Plotinian Neoplatonism, and Augustine, Baker raises doubts about whether a non-metaphysical, a-cosmic International Political Theory is even conceivable. If Baker’s chapter introduces us to IPT as a philosophical approach, Richard Devetak looks at the history of international thought to recover the idea of the ‘reason of state’ as a key feature of European international thought. While a popular idea in realist circles, Devetak finds it surprisingly under-examined and misunderstood. Through an investigation of the manifestation of the idea in the thought of some of its most illustrious exponents, such as Machiavelli, Botero, Meinecke and Weber,

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Devetak shows how reason of state as a doctrine and practice constitutes a distinctive mode of political ethics, a form of moral reasoning appropriate to the political sphere of life that develops as a distinctly European political discourse in a symbiotic relation with the state, its legitimacy, and its own forms of reason and morality. Roberto Farneti’s chapter is an attempt to reconstruct and redefine the very boundaries of what is included in IPT as a theoretical activity. Taking a creative approach that stretches the IPT canon, Farneti urges us to recognise contemporary art, museums, artistic images, cultural performances, art festivals, and curation practices as sites where both theoretical production and political transformation take place. His claim is that artworks provide the missing link between theoretical abstraction and the ‘lived experience’ of individuals or groups and that a collaboration of artists and social and political theorists may enrich our theoretical gaze by ‘curating’ these experiences in an open discourse in which theories and artistic practices constitute each other. Eventually, for Farneti, aesthetic approaches to IPT are not a mere addition to the canon but the very instrument through which the field rediscovers its own identity as a theoretical site of hybridity, creativity, and plurality. The next two chapters engage with IPT as a pluralistic field and investigate the promises of a practice-driven IPT. Leonie Holthaus does it by approaching IPT as democratic theory via the pluralist tradition. Through an exploration of the thought of the main proponents of twentieth-century British pluralism, such as Hobhouse, Cole, and Mitrany, she shows that it was the pluralists, not the liberals, that promoted the democratic peace promise most effectively and its establishment as an emancipatory horizon of expectation. Armed with that conclusion, Holthaus laments the rise of liberal approaches to democratisation post-1945 that led to the decline of the pluralist legacy of more engaged, civil society-focused theorising of the democratic peace. At the same time, however, she identifies promising contemporary revivals of those pluralist approaches that were precursors to recent practice-based IPT perspectives. Focusing on civil society activism and transnational loyalties, these perspectives can detach democratic peace theory from its moorings in abstract liberal theorising and reconnect it to more ‘applied’ or concrete forms of normative analysis, thus, in the process, reminding IPT of its pluralist origins. Maren Hofius’ chapter also picks up the mantle of a more practisedbased approach to international political theorising in a pluralist world.

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Hofius engages the ‘practice-turn’ in international relations in order to question the lack of proper attention paid to the ethical dimension in constructivist articulations of normativity. Building on Brown’s neoAristotelian idea of practical judgement, Frost and Lechner’s Wittgensteinian account of rule-following, and Ralph’s reading of Dewey’s situational ethics, Hofius recovers the normative force of practical moral judgement as an evaluating standard of international practices that can bridge the gap between explanatory and normative theorising. Ultimately, Hofius demonstrates how IPT theorists may provide a refreshing perspective for re-establishing the normative dimension of the relationship between norms and practices often neglected or under-theorised by IR practice scholars. The relevance of practice-minded ethics for International Practice Theory reveals the ability of IPT to operate as a mode of theorising that transcends theoretical boundaries. Regina Kreide’s chapter brings us back to a traditional theme of IPT, global justice, but, in a way, also seen from a practice-based perspective. Kreide argues that rather than assume an apriori positive justification of notions of justice, as it is usually the case in the liberal tradition, a more plausible approach would be to analyse questions of justice in IPT from the negative side, namely the experience of injustice in contexts of asymmetrical power relations. Taking up a penetrating critique of the liberal perspective on justice for relying on a positive justificatory framework that is abstract, idealistic, and non-relational, Kreide offers a counterparadigm of justification based on the idea of injustice. Inspired by the American philosopher Judith Shklar, but also by Frankfurt School critical theorists, Kreide outlines a conception of political injustice that is action-related and focused on the structural and political experiences of suffering, domination, discrimination, exclusion, and oppression on a global scale. Ultimately, such an approach that rests on a political conception of injustice transcends the unhelpful dualisms between ideal and non-ideal theory, normative and empirical analysis, regional and global perspectives in IPT. Last but not least, Spiros Makris in his contribution that closes this volume, looks at the legacy of Jean Baudrillard as a critical theorist whose work has not only inspired critical poststructuralist approaches to IPT but can also provide a radical framework for the analysis and critique of global power relations in the twenty-first century. Using Baudrillardian tools of analysis, such as the notions of hyperreality, chronopolitics, and the digitalisation of life, Makris shows how Baudrillard’s work does not

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only turn European IPT into a new critical theory of globalisation but it also redefines the study of power relations in an era when power devours itself in a carnivalesque orgy that brings into question all the markers of theoretical and analytical certainty: realism becomes hyperrealism, power its own simulacrum, and capitalism a dizzying phantasmagoria of turbocapitalism. As Makris notes, for Baudrillard, global politics have become a game between the fatal conditions of carnivalism and cannibalism, a combination of farcical politics and schizophrenic self-destruction. For Baudrillard, the vertigo of global hyperreality intensifies the catastrophic, terroristic effects of American/European hegemony but it also signals the end of the Western seduction, suggesting that another globalisation is possible. ∗ ∗ ∗ All contributions in this volume offer an outlook on IPT far from its conventional image as a subfield of IR and beyond its traditional thematic concerns. Instead, IPT is envisaged, approached, and practiced as a key dimension and mode of theorising international relations that creatively combines insights from the fields of philosophy, history, aesthetics, legal and political theory, ethics, and critical social theory. To this extent, through IPT the study of international relations is reconnected with earlier traditions of theorising the international prior to the onslaught of scientific and disciplinary thinking in the field. This is a mode of international theory no longer characterised by intellectual and moral poverty and paucity, as Martin Wight once suggested. On the contrary, IR rediscovers in IPT not only the European origins of a rich intellectual tradition of international theory, but also its own image as an interdisciplinary, global perspective.

References Boucher, D. (1998). Political theories of international relations. Oxford University Press. Brown, C. (2002). Sovereignty, rights and justice: International political theory today. Polity Press. Brown, C. (2015). International society, global polity: An introduction to international political theory. Sage.

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Brown, C., & Eckersley, R. (2018). International political theory and the real world. In C. Brown & R. Eckersley (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of international political theory (pp. 3–19). Oxford University Press. Brown, C., Nardin, T., & Rengger, N. (Eds.). (2002). International relations in political thought: Texts from the Ancient Greeks to the First World War. Cambridge University Press. Clark, I., & Neumann, I. (Eds.). (1996). Classical theories of international relations. Palgrave Macmillan. Delanty, G. (1995). Inventing Europe. Palgrave Macmillan. Hobson, J. (2012). The Eurocentric conception of world politics: Western international theory, 1760–2010. Cambridge University Press. Hutchings, K. (1999). International political theory: Rethinking ethics in a global era. Sage. Jahn, B. (Ed.). (2006). Classical theory in international relations. Cambridge University Press. Jørgensen, E. K. (2010). International relations theory: A new introduction. Palgrave Macmillan. Keene, E. (2004). International political thought a historical introduction. Polity Press. Knutzen, T. (2016). A history of international relations theory (3rd ed.). Manchester University Press. Lang, A., Jr. (2014). International political theory: An introduction. Palgrave. Nardin, T. (2013). International political theory. In S. Burchill et al. (Eds.), Theories of international relations (pp. 291–318). Palgrave Macmillan. Rengger, N. (2000). Political theory and international relations: Promised land or exit from Eden? International Affairs, 76(4), 755–770. Shilliam, R. (2010). International relations and non-western thought: Imperialism, colonialism and investigations of global modernity. Routledge. Tickner, A., & Blaney, D. (Eds.). (2013). Claiming the international. Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

The European Image of the World as a Cosmos: Notes Towards an Archaeology Gideon Baker

Abstract This chapter argues that the European provenance of International Political Theory shapes the field in ways that go deeper than critical approaches can show. For the European image of the world underlies both affirmations and also critiques of this European world. This is because the concept of ‘the world’ as such is already inseparable from metaphysical ontology and its image of the world as an enduring order or cosmos. I provide a brief archaeology of this ‘true world’ before turning to the question of how to overcome it. Quite how difficult it is to be rid of the metaphysical true world is illustrated by way of Nietzsche’s entanglement with the concept of world. I argue that Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal return of the same is an attempt to think world as other than a cosmos. But I also show that this thought leads to the implosion of any notion of a knowing subject that can take ‘the world’ as its object.

G. Baker (B) Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Paipais (ed.), Perspectives on International Political Theory in Europe, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77274-1_2

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Keywords Cosmos · World · True world · Metaphysics · Nietzsche

Introduction The world viewed from the perspective of International Political Theory (IPT) has largely been a European world. Who would disagree with this statement? But is it enough to point out in historiographical research that the vision of the world that shapes so much normative IPT is European in provenance? What if the critique of this European world in the name of a truer image of the world was implicated in the Eurocentrism that it denounces? This would make critical IPT difficult to distinguish from its target. In this chapter I argue that the notion of a world that can be known is very hard, and maybe impossible, to disentangle from the image of the true world that has long been the hallmark of European metaphysics since Plato. If metaphysics involves the positing of permanence in beings as truer than the impermanence of becoming, then the true world, as essentially unchanging, is clearly a metaphysical world. As Heidegger (1991) noted, this applies just as much to a world identified as a world of change, which Heidegger saw as characteristic of Nietzsche’s vision of the world. In short, all attempts to say ‘the world is thus’ risk the mistake of metaphysics, which is to forget that, before all taking of the world as an object, there is first being-in-the-world. That is to say, prior to knowledge of ‘the world’, there is a history that makes this knowledge seem like sense. Although I do not disagree with Heidegger’s argument as such, I will show how Nietzsche is able to escape the metaphysical world by positing a world which is nothing other than the history of the one who affirms it: the eternal return of the same. In this vision of eternal recurrence, subject and object of the world collapse into each other without remainder. All this may seem arcane, but, as I hope will become clear, it has fundamental implications for both liberal-cosmopolitan and critical approaches to IPT (in other words, the lion’s-share of the field to date). No normative theory of international order, nor critique of that order, would be possible without the implicit assumption that ‘the world’ is something that can be known. Take the following from a recent, and leading, introduction to the field: ‘How does IPT connect with real-world politics?

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In particular, how does it engage with real-world problems, and position itself in relation to the practices of real-world politics?’ (Brown & Eckersley, 2018: 4). But the same is true of critical approaches to IPT, which, in the same volume, are identified with rethinking ‘the institutional configuration of a world order that is already decidedly post-national’ (Jurkevics & Benhabib, 2018: 75). Naturally, ‘world order’, as much as the ‘real world’, can only be known to the extent that it endures. Even in what changes, there must be some identity if we are still to speak of it. The question then arises: where does this principle of identity reside? If it resides in the world, then I remain stuck with the metaphysical true world. But if it resides in me, the knowing subject, I think no less metaphysically. The only way out of this conundrum is to accept that both I and my world have a history, which is what the genealogical method seeks to do. The question of how closely self and world should be identified in post-metaphysical thinking is one that I will come back to later by way of reflection on Nietzsche’s eternal return.

Method In what follows, I adopt a method that is best termed archaeological. This is a method which adds to Nietzschean and Foucauldian genealogy (Agamben, 2009). Interested in the contingencies that are omitted from conventional history (which remains in thrall to providential history), genealogy nonetheless tends towards a forgetting of beginnings. Just because a beginning is accidental rather than providential does not prevent it from commanding the present. Indeed, the arkhé (first principle or command) operates more effectively for being forgotten. Arkhé-ology, then, seeks to unearth the ways in which today is commandeered by yesterday. In this way, archaeology is informed by Heidegger’s history of Being as a forgetting of Being. The history of the forgetting of Being is the history of metaphysics, which knows only beings. Objectifying the world as a being, metaphysics must miss the primacy of being-in-the-world, which, as historical, is not thing-like at all (Heidegger, 1996). According to Heidegger, in modernity, no less than in antiquity, metaphysics determines how beings are taken, including the being that is ‘the world’. That the image of ‘the world’ has changed much over this time should not obscure that the very image of ‘the world’ remains a metaphysical taking of world as an object for a transcendent subject:

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Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirety, is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before himself and have before himself, and consequently intends in a decisive sense to set in place before himself. Hence world picture [Weltbild], when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. (Heidegger, 1977: 129–130)

It is Heidegger’s thesis that, although the world as that which stands in view of ‘man’ reaches its fruition only with the modern age, it was the destiny of metaphysics to culminate in this way: ‘that the beingness of whatever is, is defined for Plato as eidos [idea, view] is the presupposition, destined far in advance and long ruling indirectly in concealment, for the world’s having to become picture’ (Heidegger, 1977: 131). An archaeology of the world as picture, the metaphysical world, must grapple with the Ancient Greek idea of world as a kosmos, a world order. Because it is ordered as cosmos, the totality is removed from change. Changeless, it can be known, and what can be known can be in truth—the true world. I suggest that the true world remains indispensable to international theory, being, in this sense, the arkhé that continues to command its present. Indeed, an implication of my argument is that the image of the world, as irreducibly metaphysical, could only be supplanted by those who, abandoning all subjectivity, experience their one-ness with world in ways that go beyond any possibility of representation. This, I will argue, is exactly what Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal return seeks to accomplish: the one who truly thinks the world as what recurs eternally can never find a point of difference between self and world from which to gain a fixed perspective on either. In what follows, I start with the emergence of cosmos-thinking and the true world in Greek antiquity and especially in Plato. I then describe the ongoing centrality of the true world to Plotinian Neoplatonism in late antiquity. Neoplatonism, in turn, was fundamental to Augustine and thereby the true world passed into Church and European history. In the third section, I outline the genealogy of the true world provided by Nietzsche. Finally, I consider the, perhaps insurmountable, challenges facing any a-cosmic conception of the world by way of reflection on Nietzsche’s

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own attempt at this: his ‘abysmal thought’ of the eternal return of the same.

The Emergence of the True World According to Rémi Brague (2003), prior to the emergence of Greek kosmos, Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilisations did not imagine that human being involved imitating the order of the world by finding one’s place in the totality. The Greek polis was now thought to reflect the cosmos, where previously the order of determination was conceived as running in the opposite direction: the cosmic order was understood on the model of the state (Brague, 2003: 14). Where once the order of the state remained an ongoing process (the heavens and earth must be periodically restored to good order by the (re)administration of justice), for the Greeks the eternally good order of the cosmos had to be reflected in a statically organised polis. The Egyptologist, Jan Assmann (2001), has demonstrated that, contrary to this later Greek thinking, ancient Egyptians did not see human action as inserting ‘itself into the static order of things’, but rather believed that it is ‘the just practice of man that contributes to maintaining the world in movement’ (Brague, 2003: 15–16). The Egyptian ‘earth and heaven’ is, in short, a process in which human society is dynamically embedded; it is not the predominantly spatial, and therefore atemporal and static, order of the Greek cosmos. The Greeks did not always have a cosmos, an ordered world that, being true, can be known. Homer still refers to ‘the heaven and the earth’ (Brague, 2003: 17). In the Iliad, cosmos denotes order, specifically ‘in good order’. It is always found in the fixed expression kata kosmon (Brague, 2003: 19). This expression is used to convey the beauty resulting from order, as in the boss on a horse’s bit or Hera’s jewels. It survives in roughly this sense in the term ‘cosmetics’ (Brague, ibid.). To use this term, with its connotations of the beauty of order, implied a decision, or better a valuation, on the Greek’s part. World was being evaluated, perhaps for the first time, as a place of good order. According to an ancient source, ‘Pythagoras was the first to call “kosmos ” the encompassing of all things, because of the order [taxis ] that reigns in it’ (Aëtius, Placita 2.1.1, in Brague, 2003: 19). Fragment 30 of Heraclitus is the first recorded use of cosmos. Although Heraclitus there describes a world of change, that change is how the world is ordered:

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This world (κ´oσμoν τ´oνδε), which is the same for all, neither gods nor men has made. But it always was, is, and will be an ever-living fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out. (Fragment 30, Heraclitus)

No doubt under the influence of Parmenidean ontology (which describes the appearance of change as false) and Pythagorean metempsychosis (the notion of the soul’s immortality), it is in Plato (c.424–347 BCE) that cosmos as the goodness and beauty of order finds its established usage in the ancient world (Brague, 2003: 20). Plato finishes a late dialogue, the Timaeus (92c5–9): And so now we may say that our account of the universe has reached its conclusion. This world of ours […is a] visible living thing containing visible ones, perceptible god, image of the intelligible Living Thing, its grandness, goodness, beauty and perfection are unexcelled.

Plato’s Republic (VI.500b9–c2) recounts how the true philosopher ‘looks at and studies things that are organized and always the same, that neither do injustice to one another nor suffer it, being all in a rational order’. Similarly, the Timaeus (27d5–28a4) asks: What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which becomes but never is? The former is grasped by understanding, which involves a reasoned account. It is unchanging. The latter is grasped by opinion, which involves unreasoning sense perception. It comes to be and passes away, but never really is.

Indeed, what model did the Demiurge, the maker of the world, use when he fashioned it? Was it the one that does not change and stays the same, or the one that has come to be? Well, if this world of ours is beautiful and its craftsman good, then clearly he looked at the eternal model. […] This, then, is how it has come to be: it is a work of craft, modelled after that which is changeless and is grasped by a rational account, that is, by wisdom. (28c8–29a10)

The dualism in Plato’s thought is not yet the separation between two worlds. It points, rather, to those two dimensions within which beings have their being—the true world as an intelligible realm (νoητ´oς τ´oπoς) of permanence in being and this world as a visible realm of constant

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change or becoming. The intelligible and the visible is thus a division in beings rather than between worlds (even if the myth recounted at ´ Phaedrus 247b–c does hint at place beyond the heavens, a Øπερoυρανιoς τ´oπoς, where true being lies). Yet, for all that, the hierarchical arrangement of lofty intelligibility and lowly visibility is clear in Plato (Republic, 509d): ‘there are these two things, one sovereign of the intelligible kind and place, the other of the visible’.

The True World in Plotinus and Augustine Six centuries after Plato, Plotinus (205–270 CE) elaborated the hierarchical arrangement of being and becoming in Platonism decisively in the direction of the two worlds—the true world (where being resides) and the world of appearance (defined by becoming). Developing the analogy of the cave from Plato’s Republic, Plotinus (Enneads, IV.8 [6]0.1) tells how the ‘breaking of the fetters’ and the ‘ascent’ from the cave are ‘figures of the wayfaring towards the intellectual realm [κ´oσμoς νoητ´oς]’. This true world is to be sharply differentiated from the ‘lower sphere, where there is less being’ (II.4 [12]0.15). For that ‘which engenders the world of sense [κ´oσμoν τo´ινυν] cannot itself be a sense-world; it must be the intellect and the intellectual world [κ´oσμoς νoητ´oς]’ (V.3 [49]0.16). Such is the true world of which this world is but an image (II.4 [12]0.4). While the true world is itself derived from the One beyond being, this is ‘by an eternal derivation’. The true world is not, then, ‘like the cosmos’, which is ‘always in process’; rather, in keeping with the character of the celestial, it has its being permanently. That which, in Plato, is an eternal idea becomes, in the Enneads, an eternal realm having real distinction from the physical cosmos: here what we love is perishable, hurtful; our loving is of mimicries [ε„δωλων] ´ and turns awry because all was mistake. Our good was not here, this was not what we sought; there only is our veritable love and there we may unite with it, not holding it in some fleshly embrace but possessing it in all its verity [¢ληθιν`oν]. (VI.9 [9].9)

The two worlds structure in Plotinus is essentially the subordination of time to eternity, which is expressed in the fifth Ennead (1. [10]4):

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Admiring the world of sense [κ´oσμoν α„σθητ`oν] as we look out upon its vastness and beauty and the order of its eternal march […] let us mount to its archetype, to the yet more authentic sphere [¢ληθινωτερoν] ´ […] [T]his is pure being in eternal actuality; nowhere is there any future, for every then is a now; nor is there any past, for nothing there has ever ceased to be; everything has taken its stand for ever, an identity well pleased, we might say, to be as it is.

This difference between eternity and time is the essential distinction between the true world, as that which is outside of change, and this world of becoming. Becoming is outside of truth, since it cannot be known other than in the very moment I experience it. True being, on the other hand, is changeless and can therefore be known: On the one hand there is the unstable, exposed to all sorts of change, distributed in place, not so much being as becoming: on the other, there is that which exists eternally, not divided, subject to no change of state [δεχ´oμενoν μεταβoλας], ` neither coming into being nor falling from it […] fast within itself. (VI.5 [23].2; see also VI.8 [39].9)

Plotinus’ emphasis is on the place and non-place, respectively, where becoming and true being reside—the two worlds. If we compare this with the passage in Plato’s Timaeus which it echoes, we find that Plato, by contrast, draws his distinction between being and becoming in the course of a description of the blueprint that the demiurge uses to create this world of becoming. Plato’s true world is a plan more than it is a place: ‘the craftsman [δημιoυργ`oς] looks at what is always changeless and, using a thing of that kind as his model, reproduces its form and character…’ (Timaeus, 27d–28a). In Plotinus too the Demiurge’s eternal plan is identified with a nonplace—the true world is not yet the heavenly realm of the Christians. But there is much in the Enneads which suggests that the otherworldliness latent in Plato’s division of being has become entrenched in Neoplatonism. In the final Ennead (VI.8 [39]0.15), for example, Plotinus writes that all that links us ‘to chance, hazard, happening’, must fall away when we attain that true life, ‘which contains no alloy but is purely itself’. It is here that we must rest, putting all else aside: ‘This become, this alone, all the earthly environment done away, in haste to be free, impatient of any bond holding us to the baser’ (VI.9 [9]0.9).

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Plotinus’ ecstatic vision is not of a passage to another world but is a deeper experience of this one. As Hadot (1993: 27) argues, with Plotinus ‘We are always in God’. Augustine, too, resists any simplistic charge of otherworldliness. Yet, as we shall now see, the framework of the two worlds remains Augustine’s model. Augustine (354–430 CE) credited Plotinus’s notion of an incorporeal God with diverting him from Gnostic Manichaeism, where the Father of Greatness was still conceived as a luminous body. But if Neoplatonism was Augustine’s way out of one dualism, it led him to another more fundamental still. For the Platonic division between a true world and a world of appearance substitutes Manichaean cosmic dualism (light-darkness) for a dualism in being itself: an ontological division that distributes being, hierarchically, between that which, unchanging, truly is, and that which, subject to change, only participates in being. In the City of God, the two cities reflect this Platonic division in being. In the earthly city, everything is carried away like the leaves that fall from the trees. But in the city of God nothing and no one will be lost to time (22.1). For this heavenly city, is ‘a kingdom which does not fail like all temporal dignities, but which stands secure upon eternal foundations’ (10.32). Indeed, the very last lines of City of God recapitulate this overarching theme: ‘Behold what will be, in the end to which there shall be no end! For what other end do we set for ourselves than to reach that kingdom of which there is no end?’ (22.30). The irony of Augustine’s metaphysical condemnation of time is that time is surpassed by way of a historical drama of redemption. Yet despite linking the eternal to the temporal in ways unheard of in Platonism and Neoplatonism, Augustine continues to rely on the distinction between the two worlds that his redemption history effectively puts in question. The victories of the earthly city are pyrrhic because ‘it will not be able to rule [dominari] for ever over those whom, in its triumph, it was able to subdue’ (15.4). The heavenly city, on the other hand, will know true dominion because its victory is final. Despite his reservations about ‘those books of the Platonists’ expressed earlier in his Confessions (9.13), the elder Augustine largely made his peace with them. The Platonists are to be credited with first catching sight of the true world as that which transcends time. For in contrast with eternal God, ‘things which are created mutable have no being’. While this ‘is a view which Plato vehemently held and most diligently commended

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[…] as far as I know, this statement is found nowhere in the books of those who came before Plato’ (8.12). Set on the right path by Plato, the Platonists saw that whatever is mutable is not the supreme God, and they therefore passed beyond every soul and all mutable spirits in searching for the Most High. Next, they saw that, in every changeable thing whatsoever, whatever its mode, or whatever the manner of its nature, the form that makes it what it is can have no existence except from Him Who truly is because He is immutable (8.6).

The forms that the intellect knows must not be subject to change, for how then could they be known? The Platonists realised that, being eternal, these forms must reside in some being ‘unchangeable and therefore not subject to degrees of comparison’ (ibid.). However, exchanging this ‘incorruptible God for images representing corruptible man’ (Rom. 1.21), the pagan philosophers have not been true to their own insight that what is divine must be incorporeal (8.10). Platonism, then, is that dim awareness of eternity that Christianity sees clearly. The true world has emerged from the shadows of philosophy and taken its rightful place as the eternity of God in heaven: ‘[Christ] remained above the angels in the form of God, being Himself both the Way of life on earth, and life itself in Heaven’ (9.15).

Nietzsche’s Genealogy of the True World When we hear ingenious metaphysicians and [Hinterweltler, otherworldly ones] talk, we others may feel that we are ‘poor in spirit’, but we also feel that ours is the kingdom of Heaven of change, with spring and autumn, winter and summer, and that theirs is the [other world] – with its grey, frosty, unending mist and shadow…. (Human All Too Human, II:17)

How is the unchanging true world of Plotinus and Augustine, indeed of ‘Platonism’ generally, even conceivable in our world of change? Nietzsche gives two sorts of explanations. On the one hand, the true world arises from the desire to escape the change from which all mortals suffer. Finding a world of change intolerable, we invent another world where change is banished. On the other hand, the true world arises from a history of resentment at the strong who, irresistible in this ‘false’ world, can only be defeated in a ‘true’ one: ‘The concept of the “beyond”, the

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“true world”, invented to devalue the only world there is’ (Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am a Destiny’). The great slave revolt that is Christianity needed a world where the first will be last: ‘morals makes God necessary’ (The Antichrist 25). We can see a tension here between depth-psychology and history: is the true world an inevitable outcome of mortals suffering from change or a specifically European history? We have projected the conditions of our preservation as predicates of being in general. We have taken the fact that in order to prosper we have to be stable in our belief, and made of it that the true world is not one which changes and becomes, but one which is (Late Notebooks 9[38]).

This note suggests that the temptation of the true world is a universal one. But, on balance, Nietzsche is more committed to the true world as a specifically European history: ‘Distress alone is by no means capable of bringing forth nihilism’. ‘Instead, it’s in a very particular interpretation, the Christian-moral one, that nihilism is found’ (Late Notebooks 2[127]). What, then, are the origins of this specifically European true world? For Nietzsche, this true world emerges in Plato: ‘the worst, most prolonged, and most dangerous of all errors to this day was a dogmatist’s error, namely Plato’s invention of pure spirit and the Good in itself’ (Beyond Good and Evil: Preface). Platonic ideas are truer than their mundane copies because they do not change. The ‘world’ where these ideas dwell, although it is not yet the heaven of the Christians, prepares the way for otherworldliness. Nietzsche admits that ‘Platonism’ in this sense, namely as the denigration of change, predates Plato. After all, the pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides’ fundamental point is that the appearance of change is an illusion. In Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (11), Nietzsche recalls Parmenides’ prayer: Grant me, ye gods, but one certainty … if it be but a log’s breadth on which to lie, on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty. Take away everything that comes to be, everything lush, colourful, blossoming, illusory, everything that charms and is alive. Take away all these for yourselves and grant me but one and only, poor certainty.

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However, with Platonism, the identification of the world that does not change as truer than our world of change is decisive. It is thereby clear why Nietzsche claims in the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil that Christianity is simply Platonism for the people. Christianity took up the two worlds of Greek metaphysics, passing it on to European culture as the distinction between heaven and earth. The condemnation of all that is earthly begins here. This genealogy of the true world explains why Nietzsche strongly identifies with what is earthly as a counter to it: I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of extra-terrestrial hopes! […] Once the sacrilege against God was the greatest sacrilege, but God died, and then all these desecrators died. Now to desecrate the earth is the most terrible thing, and to esteem the bowls of the unfathomable higher than the meaning of the earth!’ (Zarathustra, Prologue)

Looking down from the true world, our earthly world seems insubstantial: ‘World of phantoms in which we live! Inverted, upside-down, empty world, yet dreamed of as full and upright!’ (Daybreak, 118). Nietzsche’s effort, throughout his oeuvre, is to attempt a great reversal of this order of truth. Not our world of change but the true world is what is mere appearance: the ‘last wisp of smoke’ of evaporating reality, as he calls it in Twilight of the Idols (‘Reason’). ‘Away with this “world turned upside down”!’ (Genealogy of Morality, III:14), for ‘the other world’ is really ‘a heavenly nothing’ (Zarathustra, ‘On the Hinterworldly’). The ‘apparent’ world is the only world there is. The ‘true world’ ‘is just a lie added on to it ’ (Twilight, ‘Reason’). For Nietzsche, the true world is false and the false world is true.

The Eternal Return of the Same As Heidegger (1991) pointed out, Nietzsche’s identification of being with becoming (namely, his calling the false world true), far from challenging the metaphysical concept of the true world, merely redescribes it. The true world remains, only sketched in terms previously used to describe the world of appearance. Renaming cosmos as chaosmos remains metaphysical since it continues to rely upon the world considered as an object of knowledge, that is to say as an object for a knowing subject. The wise man who adapts himself to the universe is now a Nietzschean overman who

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surrenders himself to forces of becoming (rather than a Greek philosopher who models his life on enduring being). But modelling one’s life on the (dis)order of world, which presupposes a world that can be known, is as central to the Nietzschean as to the Platonist. The attempt to rid ourselves of the cosmic concept of world is an overwhelming task. As evidence of this, I will finish with a few brief observations of just how difficult Nietzsche’s own attempt at an a-cosmic concept of world was—namely his ‘abysmal thought’ of the eternal return of the same as encountered in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The epiphany of eternal recurrence shatters Zarathustra, an echo of the effect it had on Nietzsche himself in Sils Maria in August 1881, which he later compared to ‘a lightning flash’ (EH ‘Zarathustra’ 1, 4). Halfway through his journey, Zarathustra hears a soothsayer telling of the eternal return and this prophecy pierces him to his heart, transforming him (Z II: ‘The Soothsayer’). A ‘deeply upset’ Zarathustra is initially incapable of affirming this new teaching, which terrorises him: ‘The now and the past on earth – alas, my friends – that is what is most unbearable to me’ (Z II: ‘On Redemption’). What terrorises Nietzsche is the realisation that only the return of the same (even of the smallest men; even of churches) can avoid the old mistake of taking world for a providentially ordered cosmos. For if the attribution of order is to be avoided, so is that of disorder: in imputing to the world an infinite capacity for creativity, the world continues to aim at something. Nietzsche makes this point at length in a note from 1885, around the same time that he finished Zarathustra: [T]he old habit of thinking about all events in terms of goals, and about the world in terms of a guiding, creating God, is so powerful that the thinker is hard-pressed not to think of the goallessness of the world as, again, an intention. This idea - the idea that the world is intentionally evading a goal and even has the means expressly to prevent itself from being drawn into a cyclical course - is what occurs to all those who would like to impose upon the world the faculty for eternal novelty, that is, impose upon a finite, determinate force of unchanging magnitude like ‘the world’ the miraculous capacity to refashion its shapes and states infinitely. They would like the world, if no longer God, to be capable of divine creative force, an infinite force of transformation; they would like the world to prevent itself at will from falling back into one of its earlier shapes, to possess not only the intention but also the means of guarding itself from all repetition. […] This is still the old religious way of thinking and wishing,

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a kind of longing to believe that in some way or other the world does, after all, resemble the beloved old, infinite, boundlessly creative God. (Late Notebooks 36[15])

In The Gay Science, written immediately before Zarathustra, Nietzsche flirts with just the mistake he describes above: ‘The total character of the world [...] is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity, but of a lack of order’ (GS: 109). In a later addition to The Gay Science (374), however, this chaosmos is admitted to itself be cosmos piety. Our human all too human world is far too capable of ‘ungodly possibilities’, of ‘devilry, stupidity’ and ‘foolishness of interpretation’ for any order, even that of disorder, to be attributed to it. This theme is taken up in Zarathustra, where the eternal return of the same becomes Zarathustra’s central concern. Looking back on Zarathustra in Ecce Homo (‘Zarathustra’ 1), ‘the thought of eternal return’ is singled out by Nietzsche as the ‘basic idea’ of the work. Nietzsche’s basic idea seems to be that only the return of the same, an infinitely repeated cycle, is able to shatter cosmos thinking by making the world aim at nothing. For what could a circle intend? Referring to nothing other than itself, it has no beginning and no end. The passage out of the nihilism of cosmos, where the order of world (and hence the otherworldly providence that orders it so) is what is being affirmed, requires more than the positing of a cyclical universe, however. Eternal recurrence is not strictly a cosmology, which would reproduce the true world (Nietzsche’s more cosmological-type explanations of recurrence are reserved for his notebooks—he never feels able to publish them). Eternal recurrence is rather ‘the highest possible formula of affirmation’ and Zarathustra is ‘the eternal yes to all things’ (EH ‘Zarathustra’ 1, 6). If the ‘meaning’ of eternal return—meaningless in itself—is an affirmation of all things that have ever come to pass, then who is capable of it? As Nietzsche points out later, initially even Zarathustra had been the very opposite of a figure of affirmation: someone, in fact, ‘who to an unprecedented degree says no’ (ibid., emphasis added). Indeed, Nietzsche himself, in his published works at least, could not bring himself to affirm eternal recurrence; he has to create Zarathustra in order to confront this ‘most abysmal thought’ (Z III: ‘The Convalescent’). Nietzsche’s justification of this, in Ecce Homo (‘Beyond Good and Evil’ 1), is that, having completed ‘the yea-saying part of my task’ in Zarathustra, ‘it was time

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for the no-saying, no-doing half’. Nietzsche is capable of saying yes to all things only by way of Zarathustra, who ‘overtook me’ (EH ‘Zarathustra’ 8). Nietzsche’s extreme difficulty in affirming eternal recurrence alerts us to its difference, in his view at least, from ancient notions of the cyclical pattern of the universe. It is not that the ‘infinitely repeated cycle of all things’ is opposed to Heraclitus’ teaching, but the recurrence of the exact same world, where not even a spider is out of place, is something very other than the cycles of the universe of Heraclitan cosmology (EH ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ 3). Significantly, eternal recurrence also has done with ancient metempsychosis. No longer are immortal souls passing through different bodies until obtaining release from the cycle of life. The eternal return of the same has the effect, not of immortalising the soul, but of dissipating it into all that has been and all that will be. This becoming-indistinct of soul and world is the fate of all those who accept the teaching of eternal recurrence. As Heidegger (1967: 414) argued, despite Zarathustra’s self-assurance, he is increasingly humbled by his encounter with a time in which he is dispersed. There is no self: Then it spoke to me again without voice: ‘What do you matter, Zarathustra? Speak your word and break!’ – And I answered: ‘Alas, is it my word? Who am I? I am waiting for one more worthy; I am not worthy even of breaking under it.’ Then it spoke to me again without voice: ‘What do you matter? You are not yet humble enough for me…’ (Z II: ‘The Stillest Hour’)

To think world a-cosmically requires humility; such humility that not only world taken as an object, but also the knowing subject that thinks world, are both renounced absolutely. This vision of world could come only as a blinding flash to the one who is being shattered by it.

Conclusion Having first provided, in outline form, an archaeology of the true world, I then turned to Nietzsche’s attempts to overcome this metaphysical world. In particular, I focused on Nietzsche’s vision of the eternal return of the same in order to indicate the depths to which the thought of world must go if it is to think non-metaphysically, namely other than the true world. If IPT across its many divisions depends upon ‘the world’ taken as an

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object of knowledge, then what does this mean for the field? Is a postmetaphysical international political theory even conceivable? To put the point another way: how are international political theorists supposed to think world if ‘the world’ is closed off to them? Nietzsche’s odyssey led him, finally, to a world about which he could say nothing: ‘The true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps?... But no! we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one!’ (TI “World”). Are we, like Nietzsche, to remain mute concerning ‘the world’? It remains possible, as indeed it was for Nietzsche, to write a genealogy of the true world, a genealogy within which we will also find the many worlds of IPT. But in place of a genealogy of the true world as only an error (which continues, metaphysically, to presuppose an outside to the history of the true world from which to judge it), Nietzsche comes to affirm this error as his very own fate. This shift from genealogy as critique to genealogy as affirmation is what the eternal return of the same tries to think. For in the eternal return, all the things that critique seeks to exclude become rather the conditions of its own possibility.

References Agamben, G. (2009). The signature of all things: On method (L. D’Isanto, Trans.). Zone Books. Assmann, J. (2001). The search for God in ancient Egypt (D. Lorton, Trans.). Cornell University Press. Augustine. (1998). The city of God against the pagans (R. W. Dyson, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Augustine. (2007). Confessions (M. Boulding, Trans.). New City Press. Brague, R. (2003). The wisdom of the world: The human experience of the universe in western thought (T. L. Fagen, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Brown, C., & Eckersley, R. (2018). International political theory and the real world. In C. Brown & R. Eckersley (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of international political theory. Oxford University Press. Hadot, P. (1993). Plotinus: Or the simplicity of vision (M. Chase, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, M. (1967). Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? (B. Magnus, Trans.). The Review of Metaphysics, 20(3). Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology and other essays (W. Lovitt, Trans.). Garland. Heidegger, M. (1991). Nietzsche Vols I–IV (D. F. Krell, Trans.). HarperCollins. Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and time (J. Stambaugh, Trans.). Suny.

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Heraclitus. (2001). Fragments (B. Haxton, Trans.). Penguin. Jurkevics, A., & Benhabib, S. (2018). Critical international political theory. In C. Brown & R. Eckersley (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of international political theory. Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1962). Philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks (M. Cowan, Trans.). Regnery Publishing. Nietzsche, F. (1986). Human, all too human (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1989a). Beyond good and evil (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage. Nietzsche, F. (1989b). On the genealogy of morals (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage. Nietzsche, F. (1997). Daybreak (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2001). The gay science (J. Nauckhoff, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2003). Writings from the late notebooks (K. Sturge, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2005). The anti-Christ, Ecce homo, Twilight of the idols and other writings (J. Norman, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2006). Thus spoke Zarathustra (A. Del Caro, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Plato. (1974). Republic (D. Lee, Trans.). Penguin. Plato. (1997). Timaeus (D. J. Zeyl, Trans.). Hacket. Plotinus. (1956). The Enneads (S. MacKenna, Trans.). Faber and Faber.

CHAPTER 3

Reason of State in European International Thought Richard Devetak

Abstract This chapter presents a brief historical account of reason of state as a key feature of European international thought. The chapter explains how European thought began to conceive politics as a sphere with its own forms of morality and reasoning, from early modern thinkers, Niccolò Machiavelli, Giovanni Botero, Thomas Hobbes, and Samuel Pufendorf to modern thinkers, Max Weber and Friedrich Meinecke. None of these thinkers denied the place of morality in politics, but they did wish to emphasise the deeply political character of the morality and reasoning appropriate to that life sphere. Keywords Reason of state · Machiavelli · Botero · Pufendorf · Weber

R. Devetak (B) University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Paipais (ed.), Perspectives on International Political Theory in Europe, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77274-1_3

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Cosimo de’ Medici was not a scholar, but he was an avid bibliophile and patronised several humanist scholars including, most famously, the great Platonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino and the renowned humanist ‘book hunter’, Poggio Bracciolini (Greenblatt, 2011). Indeed, he magnanimously purchased properties for Ficino and paid off Poggio’s financial debts. Cosimo’s commitment to learning (or at least the learned) did not end there. He also built up his own and others’ library collections around Tuscany (Hale, 1977: 26–27). Good humanist though he was, Cosimo retained his Christian faith, as was typical during the Italian Renaissance. According to the learned Florentine bookseller, Vespasiano da Bisticci, Cosimo spent his evenings reading Saint Gregory’s thirty-five books on Moralia (Hale, 1977: 25–26). The banker-cum-Grand Duke of Tuscany also knew how to govern, if the judgement of Niccolò Machiavelli is worth anything. As the Florentine secretary noted in his Florentine Histories, Cosimo was ‘a lover and exalter of literary men’, but he was also ‘marvelously esteemed by princes not only in Italy but in all Europe’ (Machiavelli, 1988: 283). He surpassed all other men of his time ‘not only in authority and riches but also in liberality and prudence’ (Machiavelli, 1988: 281). Cosimo not only left a solid foundation for future generations of Medici rule, he also bequeathed political sayings that ‘gave matter to his enemies to slander him as a man who loved … this world more than the next’ (translation modified, Machiavelli, 1988: 283). Among the sayings he is famous for was the maxim that ‘states were not held with paternosters in hand’ (Machiavelli, 1988: 283). Cosimo’s maxim speaks to the separation of politics and religion as two different spheres of life. Cosimo understood, and wanted others to understand, that the art of government required a different ethical comportment to the one that governed the private life of a Christian. The paternosters could guide a devoted Christian in their prayers and private conduct, but spirituality gave way to a different morality when the person entered the public affairs of a city or state. There, the eternal salvation of the soul was not at stake, but political survival was. The ‘art of state’, as Machiavelli argued in The Prince, is an art with its own forms of morality and reasoning that are beyond the Christian moral categories of good and evil, right and wrong. It also has its own tools and techniques that are appropriate to the sphere of politics: ‘good laws and good armies’, not to mention the abilities of the fox and the lion (Machiavelli, 2005: 42, 60). This explicit departure from the precepts of conventional Christian

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morality was a large part of the scandal that ever since has attached to Machiavelli and other Renaissance figures like the Medici family. Beyond the scandal and outrage, the insistence that politics is a separate sphere of life with its own legitimate forms of action, reason, and morality is an established style of European political and international thought. In the study of international relations it is often associated with the theory of realism. In the words of J. D. B. Miller (1979: 43), ‘There is no higher morality than reason of state for the realist’. There has been a tendency by realists and others, however, to treat reason of state as a synonym of Realpolitik and power politics (Machtpolitik) (Butterfield, 1975; Vincent, 1982: 73). But as John Bew (2016) has shown in his recent history of Realpolitik these concepts are distinct from each other. Confusion and misunderstanding are not new. Even French King Louis XIV complained that ‘reason of State, which is the first of laws, as everyone agrees, [is] but the least understood and the most obscure to those who do not govern’ (quoted in Soll, 2005: 25). This chapter makes a modest contribution to efforts at recovering and understanding an approach to international political thought that remains surprisingly under-examined by international relations (IR) theorists despite its significance in the history of European international thought and practice. There are exceptions (see Ashworth, 2014; Keene, 2005), but it remains the case that contemporary IR theory has generally failed to treat reason of state as a distinctive form of political reasoning with its own moral legitimacy. More often than not it is treated as antithetical to a form of morality derived from Aristotelian or post-Kantian ethics. In particular, the chapter focuses on reason of state as a term of art embodying the notion that affairs of state are inherently political and therefore cannot be reduced or subject to forms of reasoning and moral comportments found in other spheres of life. From Machiavelli to Max Weber this discourse has given European rulers, legislators, and diplomats a concept with which to decide on policies and strategies in international affairs; a political discourse that found articulation across several early modern European contexts, including the Italian peninsula, Spain, France, the Low Countries, England, and the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire. The chapter commences with a discussion of political thought in the context of Renaissance Italian citystates as the moment when this discourse makes its first appearance. The key figure here is Machiavelli. The next section focuses on the author whose book launched the conceptual career of reason of state, Giovanni

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Botero. The following section turns to a later period of European history during which natural law theories adopted and adapted reason of state to the circumstances of confessional conflict. The final section discusses Max Weber’s seminal intervention and Friedrich Meinecke’s pioneering intellectual history. Their treatment of politics as a life sphere governed by its own rules and ethics represents an important modern affirmation of the grounds on which reason of state developed, giving birth to a distinctive European political discourse.

Machiavelli and the Art of the State More than anyone else, and despite not using the term himself, it is Machiavelli whose name is most closely associated with reason of state (Meinecke, 1957: 29). This is a result of the convergence in sixteenthand seventeenth- century Europe of two developments: first, the polemical use of the name Machiavelli. Anti-Machiavellianism was a polemic predominantly used by Protestants in the French religious wars to slander their enemies. For Huguenots like Innocent Gentillet (1608), Machiavellians dominated the French court, abandoning the ‘true’ Christian faith in the impious and atheistic pursuit of murderous tyranny. However, it was not confined to Protestants. As Meinecke (1957: 45) remarked, ‘the newly-animated Christian conscience of every creed rose up in opposition’ to Machiavellianism. The Catholic Counter-Reformation similarly displayed antipathy towards Machiavelli, though it sought to salvage a ‘good’ or ‘true’ reason of state that was consistent with Christian faith. This was the second development: a willingness on the part of Catholic anti-Machiavellians to ‘meet Machiavelli on his own terms’; but to develop a reason of state capable of preserving a powerful Catholic state without departing from Christian morality (Bireley, 1990: 25–27). For many Catholics, however, the newfangled ‘Machiavellian’ approach to governing was a morally depraved, sinister, and fundamentally unChristian form of politics in which the tyrannical ends justify any means, no matter how malevolent. Indeed, for the long-incarcerated Dominican friar Tommaso Campanella, reason of state was a new and false version of an honourable form of political reason (the ratio politica of Ciceronian political thought), and Machiavelli was largely to blame. As Friedrich Meinecke (1957: 91) put it, Campanella’s ‘whole political and social activity was a continually sustained struggle against ragione di stato; it was (to express it quite tersely) a series of death-leaps, to try and elude it,

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overcome it with its own methods, and thus free humanity from it’. In his Atheismus Triumphatus (Atheism Conquered), Campanella condemned the ‘most ignorant’ Machiavelli whose firm distinction between politics on the one hand and ethics and theology on the other led rulers away from the ‘art of good government’ (Viroli, 1992: 267–268). The original Italian title, Recognoscimento filosofico della vera universale religione contra l’anticristianesimo machiavellistico (The Recognition of the True Universal Religion Against Machiavellian Anti-Christianism), makes clear who Campanella’s target was and why. Campanella was right to recognise that Machiavelli did indeed seek to remove politics from conventional ethical and theological judgement. Machiavelli’s The Prince, written in the genre of ‘mirror for princes’, was offered as advice to the recently returned Medici ruler, Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino. Machiavelli advised the new prince how to maintain his rule. Most shocking to readers of this explosive little advice book was its open and explicit willingness to deviate so completely from Christian morality by justifying an approach to princely rule that possessed a political legitimacy removed from conventional moralities and rationalities. Machiavelli did not deny the existence of morality or that it could play a part in politics. Nor did he consign politics to irrationality. Nevertheless, as a political humanist, he did reject the submission of politics to scholastic and conventional Christian humanist forms of moral reasoning (Skinner, 1978: Chapters 4 and 5). For Machiavelli, politics need not look to theology or philosophy for justification or moral legitimation; instead, it possessed its own form of morality, a distinctively political morality (Skinner, 1998). It is for this reason that Benedetto Croce (1946: 45) argued that the Florentine secretary articulated the autonomy of politics, and Felix Raab (1964: 1) argued that Machiavelli treated politics as ‘an autonomous, self-justifying sphere’. In The Prince Machiavelli presented an argument for treating the office of the prince as distinct from other offices, thereby relieving the prince of moral constraints usually applied to the private citizen or Christian subject. Indeed, much of The Prince concerns the prince’s interest in maintaining his rule, not just protecting the principality from external threats, but guarding against internal threats to his position as ruler. It might be more accurate therefore to describe Machiavelli’s advice as an expression of ‘reason of princes’, rather than reason of state. This was a form of reason that responded to necessity, that looked to the results (‘si guarda al fine’), and that did not renounce dissimulation, lying, coercion,

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and other ruthless and sometimes violent practices as part of the princely repertoire, even though they would be considered wicked or evil in other spheres of life (Machiavelli, 2005: Chapters 15–19). The point here is that politics permits not only a different form of morality, but demands a different form of reasoning that is unique to itself. Whether they were religious or not, rulers should not feel constrained by religious doctrine in the conduct of government. Instead, they should employ a distinctly political morality unburdened by Christian morality. Machiavelli (2005: 62) expressed this view starkly in Chapter 18 of The Prince: a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all those things by which men are considered good, for in order to maintain the state he is often obliged to act against his promise, against charity, against humanity, and against religion.

Machiavelli’s (2005: 61) point here is that a prince ‘should know how to enter into evil when forced by necessity’. While it was preferable to conduct politics within the bounds of conventional morality, Machiavelli knew that government could not be so constrained, that circumstances would compel decisions and actions that would violate conventional morality but would be morally justifiable according to the demands of political necessity. The more specific context in which Machiavelli wrote The Prince was one less influenced by religion than by the Italian peninsula’s geopolitical restructuring in which principalities and kingdoms began to overrun and replace republics (Skinner, 1978: 113). As documented by Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli and Guicciardini were crucial in shaping the conceptualisation of politics as a practical art of government not answerable to theology or philosophy. The traditional Ciceronian conception of politics as the art of preserving a respublica was challenged, and in many cases displaced, by politics as the ‘art of the state’ (Viroli, 1992: 2–3). Whereas the former was concerned to protect the republic’s institutions of law and justice, the latter was concerned with the state’s or the prince’s interests and security as defined by a prudence casuistically detached from justice and law. According to Viroli, the shift also represented a clash between competing conceptions of reason. On the one hand, Ciceronian reason (recta ratio), which is concerned with ‘universal principles of equity that

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must govern our decisions in legislating, counselling, ruling and administering justice’ (Viroli, 1992: 3); on the other, reason of state, which is concerned with reason in ‘an instrumental sense, meaning the capacity to calculate the appropriate means of preserving the state’ (Viroli, 1992: 4). As we have seen, however, Machiavelli’s ‘art of the state’, at least as articulated in The Prince, was more like ‘reason of princes’ than ‘reason of state’. Machiavelli geared his advice towards the prince maintaining his grip on the state. Michel Foucault (2007: 243) puts it more precisely: ‘What Machiavelli sought to save, to safeguard, is not the state but the relationship of the Prince to that over which he exercises his dominion’. Nonetheless, it can reasonably be said that Machiavelli was an important ‘precursor of the raison d’état writers’ (Tuck, 1993: xii), his influence ‘fundamental’ (Malcolm, 2007: 95). If Meinecke (1957: 41) is correct, ‘he was the first person to discover the real nature of raison d’état ’. Over the next century reason of princes would evolve into a fully developed reason of state doctrine, where rulers were advised to adopt new knowledges and rationalities specifically for preserving the state itself, rather than the prince and his rule.

Stoicism, Scepticism, and Tacitism: The New Humanism in the Context of Confessional Conflict The emergence late in the sixteenth century of a new form of humanism (Tuck, 1993: Chapter 3) marked an important development of Machiavelli’s reason of princes. Thinkers such as the French essayist Michel de Montaigne and Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius, influenced more by Stoicism, scepticism, and Tacitism than Ciceronian forms of moral reasoning, justified the Machiavellian art of state on the need to establish and maintain political order, especially in the context of confessional conflict. The outbreak of bloody religious violence across Europe during the Reformation, especially in France, England, the Low Countries, and the Holy Roman Empire, dramatically changed the political dynamics (Greengrass, 2014). In France, religious violence reached a peak with the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572 that targeted Huguenots (French Calvinists). The violence of this day was said by Protestants to have been orchestrated by Catherine de Medici, mother to the ruling French king, Charles IX.

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Significantly, Catherine was daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, to whom Machiavelli dedicated The Prince. While there is no surviving evidence that the King or his mother orchestrated the massacre (Holt, 1995: 90), the accusation got purchase because Catherine’s surname and nationality had become synonymous with Machiavellianism (Sutherland, 1978). In the context of confessional and civil war, the new humanist thinking allowed rulers to move beyond the bounds of conventional morality and law in pursuit of public peace. Montaigne (1991: 902), for example, argued that it was legitimate for a prince ‘whenever some urgent necessity or some violent unforeseeable event affecting the needs of his State obliges him to go back on his pledged word, or otherwise forces him from the ordinate path of duty’. Avoiding ‘calamity’, Montaigne warned, required the prince to appeal to the needs of the ‘common good’ rather than salve his conscience. But, he insisted, these are exceptions, and the prince must nevertheless act with ‘great moderation and circumspection’ (Montaigne, 1991: 902). Similarly, Lipsius (1594: 113) legitimised the derogation from conventional laws and morality when political circumstances made it necessary, allowing for the prince to ‘play the foxe, especially if the good and publike profit’ require it. The new humanism thus added casuistry to the art of state.

Counter-Reformation and Anti-Machiavellian Reason of State: On Botero The most important and systematic contribution to the early modern notion of reason of state was penned by the Piedmontese former-Jesuit, Giovanni Botero (1544–1617). In writing Della Ragion di Stato (The Reason of State), first published at Venice in 1589, Botero launched the conceptual career of reason of state. Not unlike Machiavelli, Botero enjoyed a certain proximity to affairs of state, serving as secretary to notable figures such as the Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, and Duke Carlo Emanuele of Savoy. In the latter role, he was sent as envoy to Paris where he witnessed the French wars of religion first-hand. Though not considered a political thinker of the first rank, he was, nonetheless, something of a pioneer. The Reason of State was a major publishing success, passing through multiple editions in several European languages over the following century (Bireley, 2017: xvi). Most significantly, it

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popularised the phrase ‘reason of state’ by further modifying the ‘mirror for princes’ genre of which it is an outgrowth. It is important to outline the political and intellectual contexts to which Botero’s Reason of State forms a response. Sixteenth-century Europe had experienced convulsive political change, of which three factors stand out. First, the Reformation and its correlative confessionalisation processes. The Reformation resounded across Europe, challenging the authority of the papacy and the Catholic Church and sparking conflict and political turmoil (Collinson, 2006). The conflict stemmed from the confessionalisation processes, which saw a convergence of ecclesiastical, political, and social developments to forge mutually hostile communities around the rival confessions. Second, the dynamics of state-building. Glory-seeking rulers, advised in their statecraft by distinguished counsellors such as Richelieu and Olivares (Church, 1972; Elliott, 1984), began transforming the political structures and improving the administrative capacities of European states. This was achieved through the confessionalisation process in which communities were ordered and disciplined around a single ruler and confession (Saunders, 1997: Chapter 8; Schilling, 2008). Third, global expansion not only brought Europe into connection with the non-European worlds across the oceans, Europe’s imperial powers acquired vast territories and generated access to new resources and wealth, thus enabling state-building efforts (Elliott, 1992; Fitzmaurice, 2007). Intellectual changes occurred alongside these political ones. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the Renaissance gave rise to the abovementioned ‘new humanism’ (Tuck, 1993: Chapters 2 and 3), exemplified by the publication of Lipsius’s On Constancy (1584) and Six Books of Politics (1589), and Montaigne’s Essays (1580–1588). The changed intellectual and geopolitical context compelled rulers to reform statecraft and to rethink the form of political reason that served the state. Botero’s intention in Reason of State was to demonstrate that effective and good government could adhere to Catholic doctrine despite the political change and the apparent prevalence of Machiavellian statecraft across Europe. Like Machiavelli, he adapted the ‘mirror of princes’ genre to his purposes; but his declared intention was to reject Machiavellianism. Indeed, in the ‘Dedication’ to his Reason of State, Botero specifically named Machiavelli along with Tacitus and Tiberius Caesar as advocates of an intolerable mode of political reasoning. Machiavelli’s reason of state, he said, had ‘little respect for conscience’ (Botero, 2017: 1). He shuddered at the ‘wicked, tyrannical means’ which were being extolled as ‘the norm

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and pattern of the way that states ought to be administered and governed’ (Botero, 2017: 2); and he lamented the counsel of ‘impious’ and ‘foolish’ men who tell princes ‘that heresies have nothing to do with politics’ (Botero, 2017: 213). This ‘barbarous style of government’, he said, ‘is so shamelessly opposed to the law of God to the point of saying that some things are licit by reason of state and others by conscience’ (Botero, 2017: 2). Botero’s anti-Machiavellian aim was to redeem reason of state for a Christian ruler and polity; to bring statecraft under Catholic doctrine by revising the language of politics and political analysis and by expanding and consolidating the knowledge on which government depends (Braun, 2017: 272). For Botero, the ruler need not choose between the right (honestum) and the expedient (utile), to invoke the classic distinction of moral and legal philosophers, but should find a way to reconcile them. This forged a strong tradition of political thought among Catholic, particularly Jesuit, writers who wanted to resist the Machiavellian expediency and ruthlessness of the politique tradition (Bireley, 1990; Malcolm, 2007: 97). Botero defined reason of state in the very first sentence of his book as follows: ‘Reason of state is knowledge [notizia] of the means suitable to found, conserve, and expand dominion’ (Botero, 2017: 4). It should be noted that expansion referred not only to external enlargement of the state through territorial conquest; it also referred to internal ‘augmentation’ of the state’s powers and resources (forze) through industry and trade (Keller, 2015: 38), and by enhancing ‘the public good’ (Botero, 2017: 213). In the 1596 edition Botero (2017: 4 fn. 2) clarified that reason of state ‘cannot be reduced to ordinary and common reason’. In other words, accepting the separation of politics from other spheres, Botero claimed that reason of state is the reason specific to government and statecraft, to the foundation, preservation, and expansion of states. Steering clear of Machiavelli’s paradiastolic overturning of conventional moral virtues, Botero (2017: 17–18) nonetheless agreed that a ruler must possess two essential virtues of the military and political arts: prudence and valour. Regarding prudence, Botero insisted that it is crucial that a ruler acquire the kind of knowledge with which moral philosophers and those schooled in the art of politics (the ‘politici’ or politiques ) are concerned. Moral philosophy, he said, ‘communicates knowledge of the common passions’, while politics (‘la politica’) teaches how to temper or support those passions in pursuit of good government (Botero, 2017: 34). Ideally, the prince will also be knowledgeable about the arts of

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peace and war, but if not, he should take counsel from those who are (Botero, 2017: 34–35). Indeed, Botero (2017: 36) advised that the ruler should retain the services of experts in a range of professions who can provide knowledge and counsel that ‘sharpens’ a ruler’s prudence in decision-making. In his discussion of prudence, Botero stated ‘that in the deliberation of princes interest overcomes every other consideration’ (Botero 2017: 41). In a ruler’s consideration of alliances and treaties, commitments should only be ‘based on interest’, Botero (2017: 41) pronounced. In a later edition Botero equated interest with reason of state: ‘reason of state is little else than reason of interest’. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the concept of interest had achieved wide currency in European political thought. It provided an influential idiom with which counsellors, whether public officials or aspiring members of the public, could analyse the present domestic or international situation and offer policy advice to governments (Gunn, 1968; Walter, 2015). The Duc de Rohan’s Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome (1641: 1), which opened with the pithy statement that ‘Princes command the people, and interest commands the prince’, was a major intervention in advancing what Ryan Walter calls ‘interest analysis’. With the proliferation of interest analysis, the crucial point was to distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘false’ interest, or as Samuel Pufendorf (2013: 7–8) put it in his contribution to the genre, between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ and between ‘perpetual’ and ‘temporary’ interests. While self-preservation was the fundamental ground of a state’s interest, the counsellor to government must calculate how the growth in another state’s power and wealth or how shifts in the balance of power impact on a state’s foreign policy (Devetak, 2013: 127– 131). This required extensive analysis of the present state of the European states-system. Botero’s analysis of reason of state marked an important modification to the ‘mirror for princes’ literature by arguing that statecraft required expert counsel based on an extensive range of knowledge. His emphasis on prudence and interest influenced a raft of new humanist writings that, in different ways, legitimated the state-building enterprises of both small territorial city-republics and large kingdoms and empires, both Protestant and Catholic states. The ends or purposes of government could therefore be delinked from the private faith or interests of the ruler and ascribed to the state as an impersonal entity possessing its own needs and interests and its own forms of reason and morality (Skinner, 1989).

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While Botero and others such as Pedro de Ribadeneira still tied reason of state to Catholic doctrine (Bireley, 1990), for other seventeenthcentury thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf, reason of state became the modus vivendi of a sovereign state accountable to itself only, acting in the interests of its self-preservation and security, and mobilising the ‘forces’ of a state’s strength in pursuit of the public good. As Ian Hunter (1993/94: 89) puts it, ‘the survival and security of the state itself emerged as the prime directive of political thought and action’. It was in this context that Hobbes and Pufendorf wrote two of the most powerful and influential treatises in defence of the sovereign state in the seventeenth century.

Sovereignty and Reason of State in Natural Jurisprudence: Hobbes and Pufendorf Despite their differences, the three Italian writers—Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Botero—were undistracted by philosophical abstraction in their treatment of the mundane political art of government (Foucault, 1991); they were uninterested in philosophical attempts to ground political power and authority. By contrast, Hobbes and Pufendorf set about theorizing the state within their elaborate philosophical architectures of civil science and natural law, respectively. Hobbes’s Leviathan and Pufendorf’s Laws of Nature and Nations both operated at high levels of abstraction compared to the three Italians. Though several decades separated the Italian Catholic, Botero, from the English and German Protestants, Hobbes, and Pufendorf, the violence of civil and religious war persisted, and formed the context to which their legitimations of state sovereignty must be seen as improvised responses. Overcoming the confessional conflicts and civil wars required the establishment of a morally and religiously neutral or non-sectarian sovereign authority, they argued (Saunders, 1997). To achieve peace the sovereign had to deprive conflicting parties of appeals to any higher moral or political authority beyond the state (Koselleck, 1988; Saunders, 1997). The ‘reconstruction of government as a strictly “worldly” management of the state’, to use Hunter’s (1993/94: 89) words, necessitated the kind of governmental rationality outlined by Botero, albeit without the Italian’s commitment to Counter-Reformation Catholic politics.

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Though Hobbes wrote in a different style and genre to the reason of state writers, he was very well versed in the literature. Noel Malcolm (2007: 109–110) records that the catalogue Hobbes compiled (and possibly purchased) for the Hardwick library contained a number of works by Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Lipsius, Botero, and many other contributors to the genre, including Paolo Sarpi, Girolamo Frachetta, and Scipione Ammirato. Hobbes’s purpose, however, was not to ‘enter into the particulars of the art of government’, as Malcolm explains, but to offer a ‘science that would demonstrate the necessity of government and the need for any government to have certain essential features’. Nonetheless, he did touch on the subject of reason of state identifying forms of knowledge essential to the art of government. In a passage worth quoting at length from Leviathan’s chapter ‘Of Counsell’, Hobbes (1968: 307–308) wrote: For seeing the businesse of a Common-wealth is this, to preserve the people in Peace at home, and defend them against forraigne Invasion, we shall find, it requires great knowledge of the disposition of Man-kind, of the Rights of Government, and of the nature of Equity, Law, Justice, and Honour, not to be attained without study; And of the strength, Commodities, Places, both of their own Country, and their Neighbours; as also of the inclinations, and designes of all Nations that may any way annoy them.

In other words, to govern effectively and to meet the challenges of statecraft, the sovereign would need to develop reason of state. For Hobbes this meant developing two forms of knowledge: natural law theories and interest analysis. Natural law would provide knowledge regarding ‘the disposition of Man-kind’, ‘the Rights of Government’, and ‘the nature of Equity, Law, Justice, and Honour’, while interest analysis would provide strategic assessments of the ‘strength’ and ‘designes’ of one’s own and other states. Hobbes (1968: 308) went on to say that in respect of a state’s relations with other states, ‘It is necessary to be acquainted with the Intelligences, and Letters that come from thence, and with all the records or Treaties, and other transactions of State between them’ (emphasis in original). Hobbes here alludes to the importance of diplomatic knowledge acquired through the correspondence of ambassadors, envoys, spies, the post office, foreign intelligencers, and merchants for reason of state. Hobbes was pointing out that a good understanding of the international environment and up-to-date information of politics and events abroad are

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vital ingredients of reason of state and essential to the state’s security and survival. Although the reception of reason of state literature was late to occur in Germany, according to Horst Dreitzel (2002: 163–165), there had developed a political Aristotelianism which subordinated jurisprudence to politics. There was also a reception of Machiavelli among Protestants that read him less as anti-Christian than anti-papal (Dreitzel, 2002: 166). In the years after the Peace of Westphalia though, reason of state became a popular topic among scholars and pamphleteers who were concerned with the hegemonic ambitions of Louis XIV as much as the confessional conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Europe (Dreitzel, 2002: 167). It was in this context that Pufendorf reformulated natural law as a defence of the desacralised sovereign territorial state. One of the chief purposes of Pufendorf’s natural jurisprudence was to demarcate the respective jurisdictions of church and state. The secular reconstruction of natural law imposed a strict separation between the spiritual and political spheres of life; assigning to the church a concern to secure the salvation of souls in the afterlife, and to the state the purpose of providing order and security to citizens ‘within the orbit of this life’ (Pufendorf, 1991: 8). This demarcation was necessary, according to Pufendorf, to overcome the confessional violence plaguing Germany and other parts of Europe; violence fuelled by theological controversies. Pufendorf’s response was to focus on the different personae that flowed from the different life-spheres. In their civil persona, ‘men’ are required to submit to the authority of the sovereign rather than God, the church, or the priest. Religious disputes thus had to be kept out of the public realm. Through the creation of a sovereign authority, positive laws embodying rules of sociability and civility impose order on civil life. The state’s legitimacy does not derive from its capacity to save souls but to secure the mundane ends of order, protection, and peace (Pufendorf, 1991: 139). Pufendorf (1991: 146) emphasised that the sovereign state is not accountable to any higher authority or non-political norms or laws. In other words, by treating the functions and conduct of the sovereign state as political, Pufendorf acknowledged that it possesses its own raison d’être and is in no need of the normative justifications demanded by theologians and philosophers (Hunter, 2001: Chapter 4). While Pufendorf is best known for his abstract treatises on natural law, he also made major contributions to more concrete historical studies of the European states-system (Pufendorf, 2007, 2013). The purpose

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of these writings was to provide rulers with a usable account of the present state of Europe or the world (Devetak, 2013, 2015; Walter, 2015); a compendium of knowledge and information based on situation reports of individuals states that could assist governments in policymaking. When governments achieved an accurate understanding of the geopolitical context and analysed the interests of rival and neighbouring states, they would be better positioned to determine their own interests and craft more effective policies. In other words, reason of state demanded of sovereigns that they absorb information and intelligence offered by wise and experienced counsellors with expertise in a range of different knowledge areas.

Modern Receptions of Reason of State: Weber and Meinecke In the twentieth century Max Weber would reiterate the need to demarcate politics from other spheres of life. In his famous lecture delivered at Munich University in January 1919 on ‘Politics as a Vocation’ Weber (1948: 123) emphasised that the world is divided into ‘various lifespheres, each of which is governed by different laws’. In such a world there is no universal ethic that can establish moral rules or ‘commandments of identical content’ across the multiple life-spheres (Weber, 1948: 118–119). The ‘ethical demands on politics’, Weber warned, are particular to that sphere; a sphere in which ‘diabolical forces’ lurk, thus making an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ (Gesinnungsethik) no less likely to resort to ‘morally dubious means’ or to cause ‘evil’ consequences, despite ‘pure intentions’ (Weber, 1948: 120–126). The ethic of conviction or ultimate ends was a continuation of religion by other means and was ‘out of place’ in the mundane world of politics (Ghosh, 2014: 219). This did not mean that politics was totally bereft of morality; only that it demanded a ‘sophisticated casuistry’ and account of consequences (Ghosh, 2014: 220–221). Weber thus affirmed that in a world divided into distinct life-spheres politics creates its own forms of reason and morality (Hunter, 1993/94), and rulers and diplomats were thus expected to conduct themselves according to reasons of state. Friedrich Meinecke (1957: 6) also treated politics as a distinct sphere of ethical life in which the statesperson’s ‘moral accomplishment’ is to make ‘an altruistic self-sacrifice in the service of a higher task’. In other words, recalling Weber’s differentiated life-spheres, he sees the state as an

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end in itself and possessing its own legitimate form of political morality, namely, reason of state. Beyond demanding ‘a high degree of rationality and expediency’, Meinecke (1957: 6) recognised that reason of state also required of the public official or statesperson that they cultivate a specific ethical comportment. The ‘statesman’, he said, ‘should educate and form himself culturally’. Consistent with the Stoic thinking of Lipsius, this involves ‘suppress[ing] his emotions and his personal inclinations’ as so as ‘to ascertain the practical interests of the State’ (Meinecke, 1957: 6).

Conclusion European moral and political thinkers have always vigorously contested reason of state. To post-Kantian theorists committed to universal moral truths and single, unified moral worlds, it remains anathema. To those who accept the world’s division into historically instituted life-spheres, however, ethical plurality yields a legitimate space for reason of state. From the latter perspective, reason of state is not a degenerate form of political legitimation in which the ends justify any means. Rather, it is the form of reason that has grown out of the modern states-system; a distinctive form of political morality. With the advent of reason of state, the state became an end in itself and the object of specialised forms of knowledge. An important ethical consequence was that the state possessed its own legitimacy and its own forms of reason and morality, neither of which required the validation of philosophy or theology. European thinkers from Machiavelli to Max Weber and Meinecke concur with Cosimo; whatever value paternosters may have in governing or informing an individual’s private life, they are inappropriate in affairs of state. There, in the sphere of politics, a different art had to prevail, the art of state. This art did not draw its ethics or its legitimacy from any other sphere of life, but developed its own forms of knowledge, reason, and morality that are captured in the concept of reason of state, one of the most theoretically and practically important concepts in international politics.

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References Ashworth, L. (2014). A history of international thought: From the origins of the modern state to academic international relations. Routledge. Bew, J. (2016). Realpolitik: A history. Oxford University Press. Bireley, R. (1990). The Counter-Reformation prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic statecraft in early modern Europe. University of North Carolina Press. Bireley, R. (2017). Introduction. In Botero, The reason of state (R. Bireley, Trans. and Ed.). Cambridge University Press. Botero, G. (2017). The reason of state (R. Bireley, Trans. and Ed.). Cambridge University Press. Braun, H. (2017). Knowledge and Counsel in Giovanni Botero’s Ragion di Stato. Journal of Jesuit Studies, 4(2), 270–289. Butterfield, H. (1975). Raison d’Etat: The relations between morality and government, The first Martin Wight Memorial Lecture delivered in the University of Sussex on 23 April 1975. Church, W. F. (1972). Richelieu and reason of state. Princeton University Press. Collinson, P. (2006). The Reformation: A history. A Modern Library Chronicles Book. Croce, B. (1946). Politics and morals (S. J. Castiglione, Trans.). George Allen and Unwin. Devetak, R. (2013). “The fear of universal monarchy”: Balance of power as an ordering practice of liberty. In T. Dunne & T. Flockhart (Eds.), Liberal world orders. Oxford University Press. Devetak, R. (2015). Historiographical foundations of modern international thought: Histories of the European states-system from Florence to Göttingen. History of European Ideas, 41(1), 62–77. Dreitzel, H. (2002). Reason of state and the crisis of political Aristotelianism: An essay on the development of 17th century political philosophy. History of European ideas, 28(3), 163–187. Elliott, J. H. (1984). Richelieu and Olivares. Cambridge University Press. Elliott, J. H. (1992). The old world and the new world, 1492–1650. Cambridge University Press. Fitzmaurice, A. (2007). The commercial ideology of colonization in Jacobean England: Robert Johnson, Giovanni Botero, and the pursuit of greatness. William and Mary Quarterly, 64(4), 791–820. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality, translated by R. Braidotti, revised by C. Gordon. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. Harvester Wheatsheaf. Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (G. Burchell, Trans., M. Senellart, Ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.

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Gentillet, I. (1608). A discourse upon the Meanes of wel governing and maintaining in good peace, a Kingdome, or other principalitie … against Nicholas Machiavell the Florentine (S. Patericke, Trans.). Adam Islip. Ghosh, P. (2014). Max Weber and the protestant ethic: Twin histories. Oxford University Press. Greenblatt, S. (2011). The swerve: How the world became modern. W. W. Norton. Greengrass, M. (2014). Christendom destroyed: Europe 1517–1648. Penguin. Gunn, J. A. W. (1968). “Interest will not lie”: A seventeenth century political maxim. Journal of the History of Ideas, 29(4), 551–564. Hale, J. R. (1977). Florence and the Medici. Phoenix Press. Hobbes, T. (1968). Leviathan (C. B. MacPherson, Ed.). Penguin. Holt, M. P. (1995). The French wars of religion, 1562–1629. Cambridge University Press. Hunter, I. (1993/94). Bureaucrat, critic, citizen: On some styles of ethical life. Arena Journal, 2(1), 77–101. Hunter, I. (2001). Rival enlightenments: Civil and metaphysical philosophy in early modern Germany. Cambridge University Press. Keene, E. (2005). International political thought: A historical introduction. Polity Press. Keller, V. (2015). Knowledge and the public interest, 1575–1725. Cambridge University Press. Koselleck, R. (1988). Critique and crisis: Enlightenment and the pathogenesis of modern society. MIT Press. Lipsius, J. (1594). Sixe bookes of politickes or civil doctrine (W. Jones, Trans.). London. Machiavelli, N. (1988). Florentine histories (L. F. Banfield & H. C. Mansfield, Jr., Trans.). Princeton University Press. Machiavelli, N. (2005). The Prince (P. Bondanella, Trans. and Ed.). Oxford University Press. Malcolm, N. (2007). Reason of state, propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War: An unknown translation by Thomas Hobbes. Clarendon Press. Meinecke, F. (1957). Machiavellism: The doctrine of Raison d’ètat and its place in modern history (D. Scott, Trans.). Routledge and Kegan Paul. Miller, J. D. B. (1979). Morality, interests and rationalisation. In R. Pettman (Ed.), Moral claims in world affairs. ANU Press. Montaigne, M. de. (1991). The complete essays (M. A. Screech, Trans.). Penguin. Pufendorf, S. (1991). On the duty of man and citizen (M. Silverthorne, Trans., J. Tully, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. Pufendorf, S. (2007). Present state of Germany (E. Bohun, Trans., M. J. Seidler, Ed.). Liberty Books. Pufendorf, S. (2013). An introduction to the history of the principal kingdoms and states of Europe (J. Crull, Trans., M. J. Seidler, Ed.). Liberty Books.

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Raab, F. (1964). The English face of Machiavelli: A changing interpretation, 1500–1700. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Saunders, D. (1997). Anti-lawyers: Religion and the critics of law and state. Routledge. Schilling, H. (2008). Early modern European civilization and its political and cultural dynamism. University Press of New England. Skinner, Q. (1978). The foundations of modern political thought. Volume one: The Renaissance. Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Q. (1989). The state. In T. Ball, J. Farr, & R. Hanson (Eds.), Political innovation and conceptual change. Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Q. (1998). Machiavelli’s political morality. European Review, 6(3), 321– 325. Soll, J. (2005). Publishing The Prince: History, reading, and the birth of political criticism. University of Michigan Press. Sutherland, N. M. (1978). Catherine de Medici: The legend of the wicked Italian queen. Sixteenth Century Journal, 9(2), 45–56. Tuck, R. (1993). Philosophy and government, 1572–1651. Cambridge University Press. Vincent, R. J. (1982). Realpolitik. In J. Mayall (Ed.), The community of states: A study in international political theory. Routledge. Viroli, M. (1992). From politics to reason of state: The acquisition and transformation of the language of politics, 1250–1600. Cambridge University Press. Walter, R. (2015). Slingsby Bethel’s analysis of state interests. History of European Ideas, 41(4), 489–506. Weber, M. (1948). Politics as a vocation. In From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (H. H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills, Trans. and Ed.). Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

Aesthetic Approaches to International Political Theory Roberto Farneti

Abstract Aesthetic approaches to IPT are informal and non-canonical and do not normally emerge from academic conferences or journals. Museums, Biennales, and other places committed to either displaying or performing art, engage large publics and generate metaphors, visions, and ideas that may add up to theoretical impact. Aesthetic approaches in IPT are not to be confused with practices of international diplomacy through art and culture, they are not about international relations pursued through other means (like cultural diplomacy or mobilizing democratic publics through art). The aesthetic dimension of IPT stresses the pursuit of goals in politics via arguments or statements made in either specific art contexts or in other informal milieus and discourses in which art is used as a vehicle for political signification, and the use of sounds, images, and performances is instrumental to conveying (and “curating”) meanings and experience. These approaches are deemed to be integral to

R. Farneti (B) Faculty of Economics and Management, University of Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Paipais (ed.), Perspectives on International Political Theory in Europe, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77274-1_4

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current, canonical developments in IPT, inasmuch as contemporary art is now helping define, through a myriad landmark actions, what is left of the public sphere. Keywords Contemporary art · Curation · Aesthetics · Imagination · Visual culture · Museums

Introduction Aesthetic approaches to IPT are aimed at detecting content that is theoretically relevant but does not originate in canonical venues like conferences or the academic press, venues in which concepts, ideas, or practices receive attention and canonical status within IPT. Aesthetic approaches register with elements and insights that originate, for one thing, in contemporary art museums, that increasingly function as sites for international political activism. Artists like Ai Weiwei have made political statements through actions and performances that resonated on a global scale, affecting our perception of human rights in sensitive situations like refugee crises. Museums, Biennales, and myriad other venues committed to showcasing art, engage large publics, and generate metaphors, visions, and ideas that may add up to long-term theoretical impact. Aesthetic approaches to IPT are not to be confused with practices of international diplomacy through art and culture, they are not about international relations pursued through “other” means (like cultural diplomacy or mobilizing democratic publics through art). Museums have become distinctively genial sites of discussion and theoretical elaboration for feminism in particular, and the borderline limit between aesthetic and non-aesthetic approaches in international feminist political theory, is almost nonexistent.1 So much so that academics such as American physicist and feminist philosopher Karen Barad have challenged canonical interpretations of social phenomena by contributing academic papers in canonical venues, but also engaging in aesthetic practices by participating in dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012. The differentiation, though, is a workable tool to suggest a sense of cooperation between realms that we assume to be distinct, although more and more people in the feminist camp rather disbelieve in any such distinction and wish to create a

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new standard of common sense in the logics we use in allocating tasks in interdisciplinary situations. Aesthetic approaches reveal the existence of a secret affair between political discourse and normative political theory, and prove that this relationship, that lasts since the mésalliance between Plato and Dion of Syracuse, is not exclusive, and accommodates a variety of connivances of aesthetic nature. So, aesthetic approaches consist of more inclusive attitudes in detecting facts that are relevant for IPT. Those facts, e.g., the fact that a contemporary art museum hosted Karen Barad in its public programs, qualify as relevant for IPT and constitute the ground that this article is trying to chart.2 But unlike other approaches, where the ground is familiar and there is consensus on the facts on the ground—on what is conspicuous and what is negligible—this article makes its own ground as the insights that connect political theory and contemporary art are too sparse and incoherent. So, in the end the purpose of this chapter is not to survey a field that looks solid and coherent—that is, “to provide an authoritative account of the field” (Brown & Eckersley, 2020: 4)—the purpose is rather constitutive, for this article creates its space of address, in which people who have never talked to each other realize that they have quite a lot in common. And unlike other approaches in IPT, this one would turn out to be particularly diverse, engaging scholars (from a variety of academic disciplines), curators, and artists in a dialogue on sensitive issues. The space or realm of aesthetic approaches has never been charted before, and individuals and groups that I would identify as contributors to the field are probably unaware of the existence of a burgeoning canon.3 These approaches, though, do not converge in a niche, and to closer scrutiny it turns out that aesthetic approaches are transversal and influential. And it is sad that the grammar of international political theory, whose inflection point is the space in which IR theory and political theory intersect, is built on exclusively academic ground. With, again, the only exception of feminism, a theory that commands a vast array of actions, discourses, and initiatives. But feminism is a theory that finds in contemporary art museums an actual space of address, a venue for political advocacy, a networked system of intelligent nodes and opinion dynamics where publics are connected to the real world, to “politics on the ground” (Wedeen, 2010: 267). Feminism, in this sense, is the more vocally and aesthetically expressive and complex international political theory (featured in the literatures of the fields that constitute IPT),

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and the one that adopted aesthetic approaches to frame its agenda and connect with its audiences. This article intends to push the boundaries of a burgeoning canon. It speculates on the meaning of facts and events like Ai Weiwei’s attempt to reframe the image of the drowned Syrian child Alan Kurdi by portraying himself in the identical pose of Alan’s corpse on a shore, creating a copy of the original, but a quasi-identical copy with very special properties, namely, an object of aesthetic investigation that finds in contemporary art museums a public space where it could resonate. For the fate of the original image would have been different, it would have resonated in the formless ether of social media for one week or two and then die down in people’s transient private memories.4 Or think of the role played by Biennales, notably the Venice Biennale, with its 600,000 visitors and its politically loaded content, a vehicle of political statements that contributes to creating a global role for contemporary art as a factor of political disturbance. As it happened in Poland during the Spring of 2019, when the new director of the National Museum in Warsaw was summoned to the ministry of culture. The problem was contemporary artworks owned by the museum, artworks that disturbed the self-image that Poland was trying to project. After this meeting, the head of the museum took down the 1973 video Consumer Art by artist Natalia LL, showing a woman suggestively eating a banana. In response to the initial decision to remove the work from display, thousands of Poles, especially women, posted pictures of themselves with bananas in their mouths on social media, using the hashtag #bananaselfie. And this prompted a viral social media campaign in which people took photos of themselves eating bananas, and this again triggered a mass banana-eating protest outside the museum. The examples I used—Ai Weiwei, Biennales, the National Museum in Warsaw—show that art-activism is ubiquitous. But we need to wonder how these facts can be deemed relevant for IPT. The initiatives of an NGO or advocacy group may have divisive effects on audiences, influence policy, be used in courts, and embarrass political leaders. Is this what makes these real-world political facts relevant to IPT? If this is the case, one wonders why IPT did not register with Forensic Architecture, a project of Goldsmith College that influenced policy, was used in courts, embarrassed political leaders, and on top of this, was selected as finalist in a world-renowned contemporary art prize, the Turner Prize. With the only difference that FA is fascinating, it attracts audiences, engages their

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judgment, and makes them reflect on the facts of the real world to an impressive and unusual extent. Aesthetic approaches contribute to shifting the boundary with other disciplines and discourses and shun “the restrictive guidelines of contemporary political theory” (Luke, 2002: xxiii). And this is how IPT is assumed to depart from the normative and structural limitations of either the theory of international relations or political theory, that still understand normative texts much more narrowly as formal treatises of article or book length written by philosophically inclined experts intent on carrying on small conversations with each other in search of great truths. Such paralyzing beliefs follow more from the professional presumptions of an academic guild than they do from any clear sense of how ordinary moral instruction actually works in everyday cultural reproduction of the larger society. Museums must be taken more seriously as cultural texts and polemical locales, because political discourses have more voices in them than those coming from thick theoretical treatises propounding the writings of moral philosophers. We must focus [on] museums as sites of finely structured normative argument and artfully staged cultural normalization. Art works, historical expositions, nature interpretations, and technological exhibits, as they are shown in museums, are products of an ongoing struggle by individuals and groups to establish what is real, to organize collective interests, and to gain command over what is regarded as having authority. (Luke, 2002: xxiii–xxiv)

This chapter has normative ambitions, as it creates a new protocol for inclusion in a rubric, the “aesthetic approach,” that may help give coherence and focus to efforts once directed (randomly) to small, targeted audiences. It makes those efforts explicit and relevant. It shows that the place in which the effort is made affects the nature and intensity of the purpose. For this article shows that it is not obvious that IPT has an exclusive space, with its academic décor made of journals and specialized conferences. And that in order to grow, in interest and influence (over and beyond its canonically academic settings), it must acknowledge that “images more than reality, are our true environment now” (Dee, 2002: 37). I believe these approaches are instrumental to the realization of the discipline’s potential: they may help refocus the discourse of IPT, leaving it open-ended and uncontrolled by strict epistemic agency, where research questions are addressed by a plurality of voices, lived experiences are

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object of compassionate scrutiny, and visions of politics, as I will show in the end of this chapter, are the real forces of traction of theories. In this context, IPT takes a practical turn, it becomes research for advocacy and exhibits a normative stance that has, admittedly, “the flavor of fantasy” (Connolly, 2017: 59). In the following I will not be particularly fussy about a distinction that this article leaves partly unexplained, that is, the rather blurred divide between aesthetic approaches to IPT as a means to detect and identify the items that belong to its realm; and IPT as what theorists authoritatively do.5 I believe this is a puzzle that the constituent disciplines of IPT are not keen to address either, but that in the case of aesthetic approaches looks particularly intriguing. Aesthetic approaches to IPT focus less on major contributors and dominant theories than on the sites, strategies, and dynamics of exposure of its issues of concern.

IPT from an Aesthetic Perspective In this section I shall give an account of an immersive conversation with three artists. I believe that engaging contemporary artists in a discussion of aesthetic approaches is now necessary. The canonical frames of reference of political theory have shaped both the types of questions that were asked and the manner in which we sought answers to them. Those frames, though, seem to have lapsed, and aesthetic approaches structure international political theory by means of new frames that support our case for contemporary art museums as agents of both theoretical investigation and political transformation. A new frame allows us to see a very old constellation (artist-object-audience) in an entirely new perspective. As Claire Bishop has pointed out the artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situations; the work of art as a finite, portable, commodifiable product is reconceived as an ongoing or long-term project with an unclear beginning and end; while the audience, previously conceived as a ‘viewer’ or ‘beholder’, is now repositioned as a co-producer or participant. (Bishop, 2012)

Here we have entered a constellation in which theoretical work is no longer the authorial and isolated gesture of an “individual producer” but a complex and composite venture in which words, images, and “cultural

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performances” coalesce and lay claim to spaces that straddle the isolated, segregated realms of traditional theoretical production (Fabian, 1990: 259). This production, though, is not branded by a “featured” discipline, like political theory or the theory of international relations, and as in the case of participatory art discussed by Bishop, its terminology is “imported from political philosophy but also from theatre history and performance studies, cultural policy and architecture” (Bishop, 2012: 7), so long as architecture, art, film, and theater are vehicles of normative claims and insights that reach out to vast audiences. There are myriad cases that we could discuss, and that have remained invisible to IPT theorists, but I would like to mention only the practice of three artists: Gilad Ratman, Pablo Bronstein, and Silvia Giambrone. Gilad Ratman’s The Workshop (Israeli Pavillon at the 55th International Biennale of Venice in 2013) answered “the practical circumstances of the biennale’s invitation to symbolically represent Israel” by engaging an artist (Ratman) who staged a performance scripted and choreographed like a subterranean journey, a symbolic transit of a group of people in a tunnel that goes from Israel to Venice. And it is through this journey that the group “becomes an actual community by means of the artistic endeavor” (Shmugliakov, 2013: 142), but a community that is a miniature and parodied copy of the national community of Israel, at a difficult historical juncture, in the wake of the Resolution 67/19 of the UN General Assembly, that upgraded Palestine to non-member observer state status; after the November 2012 operations in the Gaza strip; and after the 2013 elections for the Knesset. Furthermore, the artist’s journey through the caves is a metaphor of the “Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon” (Pelham, 2014), it is a metaphorical and conceptual strategy of meaningmaking that provides theory with workable analogies, basic material for articulating the normative assumptions at work in policy discourses, and unifying conditions of possibility for further theorizing. Unlike the type of aseptic theory cultivated in the inner circles of academia, contemporary art designs its events with an audience in mind, and this is the “real world” replica of what “citations” (our working proxies for “reality”) represent for theorists: evidence that we are not having this conversation in solitude, or in a conference room open to the discipline’s sparse delegates. But at the micro-level, art events may produce effects other than political statements, and engaging the public in these events may generate “fieldwork stories” (Wedeen, 2010: 264) like

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in Pablo Bronstein’s Carousel, a site-specific project commissioned by the Officine Grandi Riparazioni of Turin, in which conceptual thinking is active, although situated and encumbered, and what the audience lives are a choreographed experience in which our notions of self, reality and fiction are challenged through the most archetypal and engaging of all literary genres, the fairy tale. And the point, here, again, as in the case of Ratman’s Workshop, is not to experience beauty (which is what art should provide) but to effect a change, to transform an urban, postindustrial environment into a space open and amenable to novel participatory practices. In a number of workshops at the University of Bozen-Bolzano, I have engaged contemporary artists in a dialogue with social scientists. I have invited political theorist Giulia Sissa to engage with an Italian feminist artist and I shall begin my “ethnography” by quoting her: “I thank heaven, the modern sky, for being cast into this world here, a world in which I have never been forced to think of my existence in the unique horizon of an obligatory domesticity.” From this earthly expression of gratitude, Sissa starts a deconstruction of a canonical feminist ideology that blurred the distinction between the representation of the female body and its objectivation, its pornographic mimesis. From this ideological fear of the image of the female body (e.g., no representation without objectification) we are distracted, according to Sissa, “by the art, the téchne, of Silvia Giambrone,” a practice that focuses on the domestic sphere as the space in which violence “is less an act than a neutral background condition” (Mendlow, 2019: 127). Or maybe a memory that exudes from the domestic interior, a memory that permeates the objects that structure the symbolic thresholds of this “théâtre intime et familial” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: 363). And the more obsolete are the objects, the more power they will have accumulated over time, like a dust, a veneer of norms and attitudes in which violence is intrinsic, never apparent. And there are no agents; no agency can be detected in this realm, as the physical contours of the perpetrators fade, and their attitudes reverberate in the interior, it is silently memorialized in the objects. The focus is not on the objectified female body, but on a “type of moral relation” in which the female body has acquiesced to its own subjection and is plunged in a background of objects that disguise violence as domestic piety. And this relation does not involve the performance of an act, it is a violence that permeates reality, and “that can occur even in the absence of execution” (Mendlow, 2020: 859, italics added).

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All these artists have introduced metaphors and strategies that straddle disciplines and theoretical discourses with images, situations, and performances that elicit the search for new levels of analysis and new forms of dialogue.

Sites of Contribution Museums used to be places that invited visitors to learn about great works of art, to understand their society, and to know more about the course of history. Today, like so many other cultural institutions, they appear instead to be in the business of debunking greatness, Western society, and even history itself. (Cheney, 1995: 144)

States have always had a stake in memorializing a version of the past that served their discourse of legitimacy. Museums tried to memorialize or celebrate the nation’s past, until they discovered that the nation had suppressed the voice of groups and minorities. National museums showcased reminders, they preserved objects deemed to possess an aura, created the category of the “time-honored,” and coined the modern notion of heritage, a sort of preservation in vitro of the most evanescent of all moral qualities of a nation: glory. Interestingly, the old constellation of artist-work-audience survives, and national museums help preserve it. Modern publics, though, have deserted national museums and are no longer familiar with the rituals and mores of celebration. They found in contemporary art museums a more suitable type of venue for their civilizational cupio dissolvi, for these museums are keen to challenge and “dis-honor” the received, glorified versions of the national past. So, at stake here is no longer the nation, for nations are not “great” anymore, it is rather the opposite of ethnocentrism, it is democracy, and its vestments and vessels, e.g., social rights, gender equality, etc. So, it seems that the cultural battle between nation and democracy is being fought within museums, and this explains why the stakes are so high, and so political, when a local government seeks to determine the orientation of a local museum, and determine whether it will be exhibiting fine art or contemporary art. In 1990 the Hayward Gallery engaged in the new fashionable trend of “history wars” and organized the show The Other Story: Afro-Asian

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Artists in Post-War Britain. And this was indeed a major aesthetic achievement and a notable contribution to an international debate with strong political undertones. And it would be consistent with the perspective discussed in this chapter to consider The Other Story as a voice in a larger debate in which participants were no longer profiled as relevant based on their professional status and their “sense of scientific entitlement” (Rassool, 2015: 148). So much so that aesthetic IPT could be framed as The Other Political Theory because the new approaches identified and made visible by this chapter feed on a different conception of the “space” of theoretical production. And if we push things as far as they go, it is not only the way space is organized, but it is also about the type of theory that we end up producing. A theory, in this case, with its own apparatus of images. Goethe argued that “every attentive glance into the world is already fraught with theory,” and the kind of theory I have in mind is a theory that bears the signs of its origins in perception and “lived experience.”6 The Other Story took place at a time when political theorists were discovering culture, that liberalism had consistently treated with discomfort and “insensitivity” (Kymlicka, 1989: 1). In fact, if we look back at the discussions on the collective rights of minority cultures that were thriving in those years, we discover a number of debates held in separate spaces: in department of comparative literatures people were organizing symposia on the current multicultural turn (signaled by the Nobel awarded in 1992 to Derek Walcott and in 1993 to Toni Morrison). English Literature resisted this pull toward fragmentation and decentralization with a lot of theory (Bloom’s The Western Canon being the most conspicuous effort), the theory of International Relations negotiated a new boundary with the realm of comparative literature by engaging postcolonial scholars in a “conference room” that so far had been populated by old school realists and a few liberal internationalists.7 This curious synchronicity is hard to explain, and drawing lines of causation might be a fancy exercise, beginning with the political (and theoretical) possibilities opened up by the end of the Cold War, or with the fact, that everyone in the late 1980s was taking stock of the great reads of the decade, and everyone had read Edward Said’s Orientalism, even though some disciplines had a more controlling attitude, while in others citing Said was not so much a strict requirement (Said, 1978). In the following decades, museums were sites of theoretical production very much focused on “debunking greatness,” targeting empires

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and imperialism, with their attendant memories of war, conquest, and slavery. How did museums engage with these stories? An exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 2015, Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, brought together works from collections across Britain to explore how artists from around the world had responded to the experiences of the Empire, examining “how the histories of the British Empire have shaped art past and present. Contemporary works within the exhibition suggest that the ramifications of the Empire are far from over” (Gassmann de Sousa, 2018). Actions and initiatives taken within the space of museums or memorials are political statements, and these statements are often framed as stories, as narratives. “of persecution and resistance” (Douglas, 1986: 80), like the exhibition of Afro-Asian artists at the Hayward Gallery in London, that brings to the fore stories and narratives that had been suppressed, stories that clash with the mainstream narrative of the Empire, as these stories reveal facts and circumstances that the Empire would rather keep quiet. It is like within families, all have their petty secrets, that should not be exposed. And literature and films have shown so many times the canonical situation of the dirty secret, “le sale petit secret, le petit secret familial” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: 64) revealed in public, exposing the authority of the family to public scrutiny. Exposing dirty secrets (about power in all its forms, gendered, colonial, sovereign, under myriad disguises, like democratic peace, humanitarian ideologies, etc.) has become the primary occupation of museums and curators. Curating is a practice whereby some objects are “displayed in a specific context so as a special meaning is created and made accessible to a public” (Balzer, 2015). Boris Groys argued that “the work of the curator consists of placing artworks in the exhibition space” (Groys, 2008: 42), which is far from obvious in the context of this chapter, whose principal aim is to inflect the space of theoretical analysis and production of IPT and expand it in a more inclusive realm, amenable to artistic interventions and curatorial practice. To be sure, empire, minority cultures, and feminism were synchronically studied in situations with little overlap, each inscribed in its own discourse. I think there is a problem here of scientific entitlement, as our “conference room” has been for a long time an intellectual comfort zone that nobody ever thought of merging with the “exhibition space.” But here comes to mind a statement that may help reframe our ideas on the

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space in which one attributes scientific entitlements. Frances Morris, after taking on her position as director of the Tate Modern, gave this awesome definition of the museum: “a University with a playground attached.” A playground is a space where people engage and participate, and the stakes of the game consist in the pleasure participants take in playing the game.8 But if the playful exchange of words that resonate in these realms concerns the meaning of democracy, or gender equality, or immigration and minority rights, then, for us political theorists, de res nostra agitur, it is all about the discipline we practice, by studying and writing, still unaware of other promising and possibly playful dimensions—over and beyond studying and writing—captured by the concept of “curation,” a new catch-word that, following Morris’ cue, we may describe in terms of mutually engaging Spiel and academic knowledge. Curation, in this context, could be the name of a novel attitude to addressing questions of larger scope, that deserve more inclusive contexts of presentation and discussion. I believe that curation, the attitude and ability of handling and organizing objects imbued with meaning, can help structure a much longed for practical turn in IPT, providing a workable rationale to this turn, urging all participants in this exercise to challenge some treasured routines, a sense of expert entitlement, the idea that expertise is always specific, especially context-specific. Artworks, instead, provide the missing link between conceptual abstraction and the lived experience of individuals or groups, and curating them entails situating the experience in an open discourse in which memories and images are “fraught with theory,” and theories, in turn, are just one level of a complex ladder of joint, “curated” actions.

Visions of Politics The aesthetic dimension of IPT stresses the pursuit of goals in politics via arguments or statements made in either specific art contexts or in other informal milieus and discourses in which art is used as a vehicle of political content, and the use of sounds, images, and performances is instrumental to articulating (and “curating”) meaning and intelligibility. Aesthetic approaches are comprehensive and are not meant to constitute a niche or a curiosity within a canon. These approaches may help pin down a distinctively pluralist and interdisciplinary IPT. This focus on place, hybridization, creativity, and art serves purposes of identity and branding in a field in which there is so much that is being shared (and is

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not quite specific), in which Rawls’ The Law of Peoples is the centerpiece of a sub-discourse that belongs to more disciplines. In other words, aesthetic approaches help to solve a recognition puzzle that makes us wonder what IPT actually is. But demarcation occurs not so much through more solid boundaries (that IPT does not need), but rather through hallmark features that may help define our work in the field as relevant. Where “field” is an extended, inclusive playground in which participants are exposed to, and value, practices that are not their stock-in-trade. And there is potential here for a conversation in which artists, political theorists, and curators engage with issues they contaminate with their distinctive touch, and the conversation will take place in hybrid situations in which no one lays claims of exclusive entitlements. And this conversation is not limited by the surveillance systems that disciplines and discourses adopt to protect their realms from contamination.9 Once we rid the conversation from this caveat, and we have learned once and for all that nothing is value-free, we have set the stage for a theory that brings upon itself the mark of its origins, the “attentive glance into the world” of a single observer. And we know that this glance is essentially a “lived experience,” a phenomenological insight into a reality in which objectivity and perspective are the same thing and there are no such phenomena as objective epiphanies, events that happen independently from observation, including that special kind of observation that we call scientific scrutiny. Value contaminates objectivity: as soon as we let value judgments (through “subjective perceptions”) enter the picture, we lose control of the process, and even a modicum of value will bias the outcome. On the one hand “the worry is that if we allow value judgments to guide scientific practice, they will infect it with dogmatism, thereby rendering it blind to the evidence” (Anderson, 2019: 49), on the other hand, value permeates experience and “defies objectivity” (Kreps, 2020). Introducing experiential, extra-methodical insights in the process—instead of abjuring “intersubjective and phenomenological considerations”—is instrumental to redefining objectivity, acknowledging the fact that observation is an intricated matter, fraught with value and experience.10 Removing subjectivity (and value) from the picture results in a sort of “epistemic abstinence” in moral inquiry that has the effect of not only detaching the subject from the real world, but also, and fundamentally, destroying the virtues of observation.11 Hendrik Wagenaar rebuffs ingenuous realism and thereby pleas for the phenomenological implications of interpretivist methods when he writes: “take the everyday experience

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out—if that would be possible at all—and the scientific concept would evaporate” (Wagenaar, 2011: 43). The rediscovery of “lived experience” as our intersubjective horizon is something that still needs to be articulated by social scientists. Aesthetic approaches could pull a research trend that has been briefly and anecdotally illustrated by Kwame Anthony Appiah in an article on the Guardian (Appiah, 2020). But if this is the direction we want to take—from overcoming the totem of value neutrality, to reevaluating phenomenologically the experience of the observer—we see that all the conditions and caveats illustrated in this chapter are the natural features of approaches to IPT that I have conveniently named “aesthetic.” And this new research environment may in the end produce new ideas and establish a highly creative attitude. If we remove value (for the sake of abstinence) from observation, we end up losing precisely the element that accompanied political theorizing since its inception in Greek philosophy, that is, creativity. For creativity and innovation have long been a major concern in political theory, for this discipline produced images of cities and states that did not exist, and these images were meant to be normative templates that one could use to design or redesign creatively a polity. Political theory, though, seems to have lost much of its age-old ability to envision and imagine. Since Wolin’s Politics and Vision, the link between the two has dissolved, and the intrinsically visionary stance of the discipline was taken over by a more mundane ability to make predictions (Wolin, 2004). I believe that normative insights and concerns have simply changed vehicle and are now colonizing other dimensions of human discourse and visual culture. And have become distinctively ubiquitous, for ubiquitous and viral are the new carriers of those insights and concerns. Social media, popular fiction, art exhibitions, and a general attitude to share and spread “fanciful statements” (e.g., stories made with words and images), indicate that “vision” is still a favorite dimension. And it is politics, again, the site in which the multiple efforts to make the world a better place for everyone combine words and images.12 Hobbes, according to Wolin, put forth a fanciful depiction of political order, and in doing so “he hoped to assist his readers in seeing some of the basic presuppositions on which a political order rests” (Wolin, 2004: 18, italics added). And he produced a powerful image of a well-ordered community at a time, the heydays of politics as vision, when images were acknowledged as powerful vehicles of conceptual content.

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Normative clues of a visual type can be gleaned in contemporary art exhibitions or curatorial projects (see Scotini, 2019). Think of Utopia Station, curated by Molly Nesbit, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, presented at the Fiftieth Venice Biennale in 2003, an exhibition that “employed artworks as illustrations, as documents of the search for a social utopia” (Groys, 2008: 49). And following Wolin we may just wonder why social utopias have lost momentum in the discourse of the social sciences. We may resort to workable second bests: instead of utopias, policies of urban design and regeneration would help to make the real world a better place (see Iannelli & Musarò, 2017). IPT may then support the case for employing “artworks as illustrations,” and make our often arid, verbose, and aniconic realms of theoretical confrontation aesthetically inspiring.

Notes 1. I take feminism to consist essentially in the “belief that if there is a voice of truth - assuming there is such a thing as truth, and assuming this truth can speak - it comes from the mouth of a woman” (Auster, 2012: 123). 2. Barad’s talk at the Castello was meant to challenge “the traditional interpretation of social phenomena like colonialism, capitalism, militarism, racism, nationalism, and environmental destruction” from a perspective that challenges a variety of boundaries (between academic realms, between museums and conference rooms, and between academic and nonacademic practice). https://www.castellodirivoli.org/en/evento/12170/. 3. Unlike others, I do not see an aesthetic turn in either IPT or the social sciences at large. Students of IPT intrigued by aesthetic approaches might search the recent Oxford Handbook for a clue, to no avail. Aesthetic approaches, thus far, have emphasized the power of images, interdisciplinarity, the necessity of engaging with the arts, but the overall argument is frustratingly abstract and somewhat unwieldly. And I am not sure if one should agree with Bleiker (2017) that “agenda setting” should not be the principal goal of such approaches. 4. As if, in order to retain its force, the image had to undergo a process, and be transformed, in order to retain the “quality of humanity” in something different. I believe that Rachel Cusk’s memoir The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy captures this insight into the nature of contemporary art as a proxy of reality: “It strikes me that the glory of art is the glory of survival, for survival is an inhuman property. […] That which is human decays and disappears: only in art does the quality of humanity favor survival. Only in art is the record kept of an instant, that the next instant doesn’t erase” (Cusk, 2009: 199).

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5. Woodrow Wilson is an object of theoretical scrutiny but not (if not in a very limited sense) a theorist. John Rawls is both. The editors of the Oxford Handbook of IPT present the same puzzle when they argue that: “If IPT is concerned not only with reflecting on, and refining, existing ideas, norms, and practices in real-world politics but also with challenging and transforming them according to desired ideals and goals, then it is necessary and important to understand how IPT is positioned vis-à-vis the real world” (Brown & Eckersley, 2020: 4). 6. On the notion of “lived experience,” see more extensively the following section. 7. Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison have urged scholars of IR, instead of relying on social scientific methods alone, to engage with “the type of ‘common discourse’ that Edward Said and other more interdisciplinary authors advocate: a broad understanding of society and politics that replaces the current specialisation of knowledge” (Bleiker & Hutchison, 2008: 133). 8. On contemporary art as “Disneyworld for grownups,” see Balzer (2015). 9. One of the major contributions of the Oxford Handbook of IPT is the claim that “the assumption of normative or value neutrality in social scientific inquiry is no longer sustainable” (Brown & Eckersley, 2020: 11). 10. The editors of the Oxford Handbook of IPT limit the authority of “phenomenological considerations” to the methodological realm of a specific mode of normative inquiry: “interpretation,” an approach whose distinctive objects are “texts,” where “the term ‘text’ should be understood as widely as possible, and not restricted to written materials” (Brown & Eckersley, 2020: 5). 11. On this notion of epistemic abstinence, see Raz (1994: 84). 12. And it is precisely this combination that prescribes a renovated use of the notion of curation, as “an extension of museum and gallery practice, an act of selecting, organizing, and presenting items in the vein of an arbiter/editor” (Balzer, 2015: 1).

References Anderson, E. (2019). Uses of value judgments in science: A general argument, with lessons from a case study of feminist research on divorce. In T. Rutzou & G. Steinmetz (Eds.), Critical realism, history, and philosophy in the social sciences (pp. 47–71). Bingley. Appiah, K. A. (2020, November 14). Why are politicians suddenly talking about their ‘lived experience?’ The Guardian. Auster, P. (2012). The invention of solitude (1982). Faber & Faber.

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Balzer, D. (2015). Curationism: How curating took over the art world and everything else. Pluto Press. Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Verso. Bleiker, R., & Hutchison, E. (2008). Fear no more: Emotions and world politics. Review of International Studies, 34, 115–135. Bleiker, R. (2017). In search of thinking space: Reflections on the aesthetic turn in international political theory. Millennium—Journal of International Studies, 45(2), 258–264. Brown, C., & Eckersley, R. (2020). International political theory and the real world. In C. Brown & R. Eckersley (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of international political theory. Oxford University Press. Cheney, L. V. (1995). Telling the truth: Why our culture and our country have stopped making sense—And what we can do about it. Simon and Schuster. Connolly, J. (2017). The life of Roman republicanism. Princeton University Press. Cusk, R. (2009). The last supper: A summer in Italy. Faber and Faber. Dee, J. (2002). Palladio. Doubleday. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2013). L’Anti-OEdipe. Capitalisme et schizophrénie (1972). Les éditions de minuit. Douglas, M. (1986). How institutions think. Syracuse University Press. Fabian, J. (1990). Power and performance: Ethnographic explorations through proverbial wisdom and theater in Shaba, Zaire. University of Wisconsin Press. Gassmann de Sousa, B. (2018, Autumn). Decolonising Nigerian Modernism: Ben Enwonwu’s ‘Identity in Politics’. Tate Papers, no. 30. https://www. tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/30/decolonising-nigerianmodernism-ben-enwonwus-identity-politics. Accessed 17 Mar 2021. Groys, B. (2008). Art power. MIT Press. Iannelli, L., & Musarò, P. (2017). Performative citizenship: Public art, urban design, and political participation. Mimesis International. Kreps, C. (2020). Museums and anthropology in the age of engagement. Routledge. Kymlicka, W. K. (1989). Liberalism, community, and culture. https://doi.org/ 10.1086/293476. Luke, T. W. (2002). Museum politics: Power plays at the exhibition. University of Minnesota Press. Mendlow, G. S. (2019). The elusive object of punishment. Legal Theory, 2(25), 105–131. Mendlow, G. S. (2020). Thoughts, crimes, and thought crimes. Michigan Law Review, 5(18), 841–876. Pelham, N. (2014). Gaza’s tunnel phenomenon: The unintended dynamics of Israel’s siege. Journal of Palestine Studies. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps. 2012.XLI.4.6.

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Rassool, C. (2015). Human remains, the discipline of the dead, and the South African memorial complex. In D. R. Peterson, K. Gavua, & C. Rassool (Eds.), The politics of heritage in Africa (pp. 133–156). Cambridge University Press. Raz, J. (1994). Facing diversity: The case of epistemic abstinence. Oxford University Press. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon. Shmugliakov, P. (2013). The workshop of artwork’s community. In Gilad Ratman The Workshop. Catalogue of the Israeli Pavillon, 55th Venice Biennale (pp. 125–153). Scotini, M. (2019). Utopian display: Geopolitical curating. Quodlibet. Wagenaar, H. (2011). Meaning in action: Interpretation and dialogue in policy analysis. Routledge. Wedeen, L. (2010). Reflection on ethnographic work in political science. Annual Review of Political Science, 13, 255–272. Wolin, S. (2004). Politics and vision: Continuity and innovation in Western political thought (1960). Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Democratic Peace as a Horizon of Expectation: Liberalism and Pluralism Revisited Leonie Holthaus

Abstract In this chapter, I approach international political theory (IPT) as democratic theory via the pluralist tradition. I begin by observing a severe mismatch: while practice-driven observations prompted the (re-)introduction of IPT, the theory’s internal logics continue to favour theory-driven arguments, as evident in cosmopolitan democratic theory. Against this backdrop, I make an historical and theoretical argument to further engaged democratic theorizing within IPT. Historically, I revisit British twentieth-century pluralism vis-à-vis liberalism to reveal the long but forgotten history of IPT and the potential of a practicedriven IPT. This historical weaving bears the argument that we best define pluralism on the basis of opposition to oligarchy, criticism of representative democracy and concern with peace-promoting civil society activism. By implication, pluralists, rather than liberals, contributed to democratic

L. Holthaus (B) Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Paipais (ed.), Perspectives on International Political Theory in Europe, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77274-1_5

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peace’s emergence into a modern horizon of expectation. Then, I posit that three trends, or theoretical ruptures, lead to the marginalization of emancipatory perspectives on democratic peace theory: the respective rises of positivism and quantitative liberal democratic peace theory, and declining trust in democratization. Still, there are promising trends such as the newfound consideration of civil society activism as a necessary ingredient of democratic peace. Keywords Pluralism · Liberalism · Democratic peace · Cosmopolitan democracy · Engaged theory

Introduction This chapter approaches international political theory (IPT) as democratic theory via the pluralist tradition. This approach skews distinctly “European”, and for two reasons. The first derives from certain realities of history: namely, that the democratic vocabulary originated in Europe— albeit in highly complex manners and along with transnational exchanges (Holthaus, 2018: Chapter two)—and continues to be the one of the most important lenses through which European thinkers and citizens observe themselves and others (Albert, 2016: 83–88). Second, in European and particularly German discourses debating what IPT actually is, concerns with cosmopolitan or global democracy are most often identified as the identity-creating core of the interdisciplinary endeavour (Neyer, 2013; Niederberger, 2016: 110; Niesen, 2010: 275; Smith, 2000). The debates about cosmopolitan democracy, however, are marked by severe internal tension. While practice-driven observations—e.g. of steadily rising degrees of transnational inequality—prompted the (re-)introduction of IPT, the theory’s internal logics continue to favour theory-driven arguments (Deitelhoff & Daase, 2015; Kreide, 2020). This latter orientation has proliferated abstract debates about cosmopolitan democracy, which together largely obscure the underlying political project—the democratization of international organizations that interfere in citizens’ everyday lives. The same holds true for proposed paths, which envisage the transformation of the United Nations (UN) general assembly into a global parliament, a decentralized empowerment of civil society actors throughout the UN system, or just the peaceful, perhaps

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slightly managed co-existence of democratic states (Archibugi, 1992). Here, democratization through parliamentary institutions continues to lose its appeal, and is by now rather seen as an unrealistic and rather Eurocentric idea (Grigorescu, 2015; Macdonald & Macdonald, 2010). Against this backdrop, and in view of what is considered as conventional knowledge in the discipline of International Relations (IR), I advance a historical and theoretical argument in what follows. Historically, I reconstruct forgotten, practice-driven approaches to IPT as democratic theory by revisiting the emergence and development of European, specifically British, twentieth-century pluralism vis-à-vis liberalism. To complement this reconstruction, I then advance a theoretical argument for the reclamation of democratic peace theory within IPT, whose attendant debates may recalibrate otherwise overly abstract debates. To avoid any misunderstanding, however, I want to make clear that my line of argument here does not endorse the perpetual existence of nation states but rather holds that so long as more or less sovereign states help the preservation of oligarchy, we may follow pluralist understandings of national and transnational democratization as complementary, processual endeavours (Saward, 2011; Tilly, 2007). Hence, if we adapt a practice-based and processual understanding, we may think about democratization vis-à-vis oligarchy in different contexts and at different levels. To begin, I will introduce pluralism and liberalism in further detail before I analyse the rise of liberal and positivistic democratic peace theory as a rupture within democratic peace thinking. This precedes my arguing for IPT’s perspectives on democratic peace.

Revisiting Pluralism and Liberalism As my argument rests on such terms as liberalism, pluralism and horizon of expectation, this section precedes its historical overview with their various definitions. Both liberalism and pluralism reflect “living”, steadily changing traditions of thought. Although a common term, definitions of liberalism, especially British liberalism, conventionally begin with acknowledgement of the term’s fuzzy, contradictory and changing conceptual architecture (Bell, 2014b). Only three principles remain unambiguously liberal: belief in the individual as the sole unit of moral concern, faith in a free market and commitment to the rule of law and (possibly also) representative democracy (Lawson, 2015: 103). Still, it is critical to understand that even classical liberalism’s evolution in the

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nineteenth and twentieth centuries was polyvocal, and that subtypes of liberalism entertain varying relations to constitutionalism, democracy and the organization of the market (Kurki, 2013: 31–46). This is evident in, for instance, alternating preferences for constitutionalism or democracy (Recchia, 2018). In IR, liberalism initially continued the legacies of British imperialism before engendering support for liberal democracy and multilateralism, once the dyadic democratic peace theses—the assumption that democracies do not fight one another—became a core disciplinary belief (Long & Schmidt, 2005). Even so, left-liberal or pluralist positions often observe that democracy is not necessarily self-maintaining, that social deterioration and the emergence of oligarchy is likely whenever constitutionalism goes unchecked by democratic participation and that democratic peace arises less from (capitalist) international interdependence than experienceable transnationalism (Berman, 2017). The term pluralism acquired different meanings in different national contexts and academic disciplines (Holthaus & Noetzel, 2012). British pluralism, for instance, is seen as a tradition that contests the state’s sole authority over the individual and that points to groups as vehicles for the representation of socio-economic interests (Bevir, 2012; Laborde, 2000: 45). The influence of the British tradition permeated German pluralism upon WWII’s end in 1945, although most German thinkers thereafter gravitated towards liberal conceptions (Eisfeld, 1972; Fraenkel, 1991; Holthaus & Noetzel, 2012). Such liberal approaches are common in American political theory, where pluralism is largely defined by its analytical focus on groups, but not ubiquitously so, as some American theorists—William E. Connolly (1991, 1995) and in part Robert Dahl (1985)—have rather striven to conceive it in a more egalitarian manner. In IR, both normative and analytical critiques of the state system and a focus on transnationalism are defining traits of pluralism (Cerny, 2010; Little, 1996; Sylvest, 2007). In this chapter, I draw particularly on British pluralism, which I define on the basis of its engagement with democracy in IR. Indeed, the well-known pluralist critique of the state is only one manifestation of the tradition’s more multifaceted critique of democracy. The tenets of pluralist thinking developed in response to early twentieth-century imperialism and democratization, rather than anarchy, as is often and misleadingly claimed (Morefield, 2013). The pluralist tradition theorizes oligarchy as the opposite of democracy, views civil society as an agent

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of democratization and puts its emphasis on transnational loyalties as the leading stimulant of (a coming) democratic peace. Hence, pluralism can overlap with liberalism, but in contrast to the latter’s proponents, pluralists advocate for further participation, also at the expense of gradual democratization (Hirst, 1993). The term “horizon of expectation” was introduced by the German philosopher Gadamer (Gadamer, 1960). The term itself bears from a core suggestion that we first frame our inquiries of the traditions we seek to understand with their historical contextualization prior to our using them as theoretical resources for our own struggles. Our understanding creates a horizon of expectation that is then applied to contemporary problems. My historical approach to pluralism is inspired by this understanding, in showing that pluralist thinkers seized the democratic vocabulary as a tool of modern self-description and that their critique of the imperfect British democracy and British imperialism constructed a horizon of dissatisfaction and hope (Müller, 2014: 7; O’Donnell, 2007: 8). Pluralists assumed that democratic peace, as far as it is observable, remains in a dynamic state, and, moreover, that their interventions must serve to identify normative dilemmas, historical genealogies and practical and political trade-offs. My theoretical argument hence seeks to revitalize this spirit for the perpetuation of democratization as a horizon of expectation potentially achieved through debates about democracy infused both by dissatisfaction with real-existing democracies and hope for a better, more democratic and peaceful future (O’Donnell, 2007: 8).

Early Twentieth-Century Pluralism I derive my understanding of pluralism from the contributions of three authors: L.T. Hobhouse (1864–1929), a philosopher, journalist and first professor of sociology in Britain at the London School of Economics (Holthaus, 2014b); G.D.H. Cole (1889–1959), a social theorist, Fabian “activist scholar” and first professor of social theory at the University of Oxford (Holthaus, 2014a); and David Mitrany (1888–1975), an emigre scholar, IR theorist and policy advisor (Wallace, 1996: 319). Other international thinkers sympathizing with or equally contributing to pluralism include Leonard Woolf and Harold Laski (Lamb, 2004). Each was politically active public figures who forged their democratic ideals through a fluid move between theory and practice (Holthaus & Stockmann, 2020).

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These particular pluralists had no scholastic understanding of theory, rather assuming progressive thought to remain ineffective when formulated as an academic reflection out of touch with society, even if they, as academics, imposed a certain rationality on their writings. They inherited, drew on and changed existing pluralist ideas, in a process whose dimensions were not only cognitive (Hall & Bevir, 2014) but also emotional (Brown, 2005: 54). Indeed, changes of political and theoretical attitudes may emerge from productive but emotionally intense periods of (re-)orientation, and the pluralists were certainly troubled by the rise of anti-democratic twentieth-century nationalism. And on that subject, their work was cumbered with interpersonal and theoretical tension: Mitrany did not get along with Cole, and both frequently argued about the question as to whether nationalism could be forced back by political strategies prioritizing short-term attempts at social redistribution or longterm attempts at transnationalism (Mitrany, 1975: 81). Even with these internal disputes, however, they managed to qualify, popularly so, liberal theory and practice. Pluralism originated as a critical discourse on core liberal concepts such as representative democracy. Such liberals as Alexis de Toqueville (1998: 33) observed that democracy flourished in industrializing countries and that nations who engaged in manufacturing and commerce developed similar class structures. For Tocqueville and adjacent thinkers, peace- or war-promoting publics related to domestic and transnational balances of (class) power and each class’s enlightened self-interest. Transnational and social dimensions hence occupied a vanguard space in the democratic theories that were used to describe modern societies (Albert, 2016) “Can democracy”, Toqueville (1998 [1835/1840]: 3) rhetorically asked, “which has overthrown the feudal system and vanquished kings, stop before the tradesman and capitalists?”. Initially, both liberals and pluralists conceived civil society as a counterweight to militarism, and theorized on the extension and deepening of representative practices (MacMillan, 1998). But whereas liberals tended to speak of liberal regimes with limited suffrage as if they were full democracies, pluralists held a less dismissive view, giving discursive salience to the suffrage limitations, unevenly distributed chances for democratic participation and restrictions on the freedom of association of such contexts. Recall here that few citizens enjoyed the right to vote in early twentiethcentury Britain, that suffrage rights depended on gender, property and age, and that those who engaged in politics were most often descendants

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of the nobility with Oxbridge degrees (Woolf, 1933). Hence, the pluralists had good reasons to argue that the creation of an enlightened and truly peace-promoting public opinion depended on the reform of structural constraints, such as socio-economic inequality, and on each citizen’s acknowledgement and rational dealing with the moral and emotional demands arising from different, possibly transnational group memberships. Thus we see, even with the convention being to think of liberty, equality and solidarity as modern democratic promises, that the promises of solidarity and peace are related. In further divergence from liberal thought, which contrasted monarchy and peace-promoting constitutionalism (Root, 1917), pluralists distinguished between oligarchy and democratization (Bell, 2014a: 650). Oligarchy may be defined as the self-maintaining rule of the economically privileged few (Winters & Page, 2009: 732), maintained by way of socio-economic exclusion and exploitation. From a pluralist angle, democratization, in contrast, refers to the ongoing attempt to mitigate oligarchic power, in all the differing forms this takes in different contexts. In their days, pluralists often equated democratization with the transnational emancipation of the working class, all while continuing their queries of “this word democracy” (Cole, 1945). Hobhouse (1945) was the first to observe that representative democracies can maintain oligarchic structures. He qualified inherited liberal ideas when he famously argued that liberty without socio-economic equality was nothing but a noble word. In his view, true liberty implied socio-economic rights, such as the right to choose an occupation, and socio-economic redistribution, which were to curtail power inequities in reducing possible accumulations of property. The ideal was a fairer distribution of property, enabling each individual the pursuit of happiness and participation in public life, without which they would be unable to make full use of their civic and political liberties. Cole argued even more forcefully that democratization depended on the abolishment of the fundaments of capitalist society, e.g. market competition and the stratification of people into socio-economic classes. He moreover incorporated to pluralist thought new emphasis on (recurring) democratic participation as indispensable for the realization of a just society. For Cole (1920: 103), territorial representation and parliamentarianism were insufficient tools to shatter oligarchic structures: “the idea of democracy has become almost inextricably tangled up with the idea

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of representative government, or rather with a particular theory of representative government based on a totally false theory of representation”. The assumption of representative democracy within the contained state was that an authorized person could represent another person’s bundled interests; however, in governing, large parties with internal oligarchic structures reduced citizens to occasional voters, while parliament, in “profess[ing] to represent all the citizens in all things…, as a rule, represent[ed] nothing in anything” (ibid.: 109). Representative democracies with oligarchic structures hence continued to benefit imperialists and capitalists while not allowing for the representation of all entitled interests. Following Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Cole claimed that civic activism would only unfold positively in the absence of vast socio-economic inequalities; otherwise, (wo)men could not meet as equals moving beyond their personal interests. Instead of territorial, as Cole argued, only vocational and issue-specific representation and civic activism could serve the expression of citizens’ concerns. For Cole (1962: 115–116), these concerns materialized in membership-based, democratically organized associations, which held a temporal and defeasible right to represent a civic or vocational concern. Here, representation did not substitute participation but implied constant activism, and thereby educative processes as individuals were asked to take on different perspectives and to identify with a common good. Redefined in participatory terms, democratization allowed for further personal autonomy and development in providing citizens the licence to choose groups emotively, and particularly those that might impact their views and loyalties (Lindsay, 1914: 133). To capture this, Cole spoke of “expressive liberty” (1918: 193) as the counterweight to the slave virtue of self-repression in capitalist times (Cole, 1922). Whereas Kant tended to focus on liberty based on cognitive discipline, Cole’s concept denoted the joy of an individual reaps in association, the sharing of experiences, creative work and affective communication. In sum, Cole’s (1972: 45) concept was all about the total absence of constraints to one’s being: “freedom for self-expression, freedom at work as well as at leisure, freedom to serve as well as to enjoy”. Mitrany (1955b) reiterated beliefs in the virtues of civic activism, while simultaneously advancing concerns with oligarchic trends within civil society organizations. Trade unions had long served as a model for civic activism. Yet while Cole acknowledged a need to democratize their internal and increasingly bureaucratic structures, Mitrany (1955a) in

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particular worried about their alignment with the welfare state and thus turned to non-governmental organizations as better avenues for activism, though he eyed their representation of sectional interests by professional means often with scepticism. Hence, for Mitrany, the democratizing force of civil society organizations depended on their internal organization and furtherance of overlapping and conflicting loyalties and obligations. As opposed to the liberal assumption that constitutionalism would put sufficient checks upon monarchical interests in power extension and economic gains, pluralists argued that only overlapping and conflicting loyalties could promote peace. Again, Hobhouse was the first to recognize the importance of socio-economic equality for the democratic peace promise. He was deeply troubled by the fact formal democracies still entailed oligarchic elites, and that nationalism mitigated their critique. He (1972: 49) found that Kantian liberalism did not anticipate that democratization would be accompanied by industrialization and, in effect, domestic inequality, imperial extensions and war-promoting public opinions. He qualified the peace promise in view of the social question and called for a social democracy as a precondition to enlighten public opinion and to avoid democratic backsliding (MacMillan, 1998: 109–110): “If confined to the dominant races, or to the independent sovereign state, imperial democracy becomes itself an oligarchy. Sovereign democracy as one among many sovereigns may be as pugnacious or cynical as sovereign aristocracy” (Hobhouse, 1921: 129). Cole (1934: 13) recognized the mutually reinforcing relationship between the preservation of oligarchy and nationalism as the greatest hindrance to further democratization: “If men can be made to feel more aggressively Nationalist than class-conscious, they may be induced in the name of the ‘National idea’ and the ‘Totalitarian State’ to refrain from challenging the injustice of the economic order”. Cole’s claim spoke to the way in which absolutist political power had just been replaced by monopolies of economic power, or oligarchy. Through the state, economic power had become the driving force in modern society until nationalism and economic inequalities became mutually reinforcing so that class loyalty proved to be too weak to effectively check nationalism. Nationalism became an ideology that effectively blurred the continuity of class rule. Hence, for the pluralists, representative or liberal democracies were not necessarily more peaceful than monarchic autocracies; and they rather argued that the insufficient democratization of oligarchic Western states and existence of a transnational oligarchy could explain

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the war-prone behaviour of imperial states and formal democracies (Bell, 2014a: 650). In their diagnoses, war was not a result of too much democratization, but of too little. Pluralists thought of the cultivation of transnationalism as a counterweight to nationalism (Holthaus, 2014b). Hobhouse (1922: 88) observed: “[E]ach individual is a member of many societies. He is one of family, he belongs to a church, to a corporation, to a trade union [...]”. Following Hobhouse, transnational networks, and the loyalties they prompt, may drive back nationalism, since people who “are opposed in one relation find themselves cooperating in another”. Different and overlapping associations would guarantee public deliberation and unwillingness to go to war. While Hobhouse developed this idea theoretically, Mitrany captured and promoted it in practice, simultaneous to extending it in theory. In contrast to Hobhouse and particularly in view of national welfare, he (Mitrany, 1949) argued that such overlapping group memberships had to be both transnational and related to practical aspects of life to make them experienceable in daily life. If my preceding historical account is correct, then the concept of democracy is critical to all modern horizons of expectation. Since the late nineteenth century, most thinkers have used the vocabulary of democracy to attribute meaning to domestic or international problems (Bell, 2007: 41). British liberals grappled with inevitable, socialism-implying democratization and only accepted a tamed version in the form of representative democracy. In the context of First World War propaganda, American liberals found that constitutional states would be less war-prone than monarchies, and this move has provided the basis for theorizations of liberalism’s democratic peace thesis (Root, 1917: 32; Russett, 1993). Hence, in my reading, not liberals but their pluralist critics viewed democracy as a demanding concept and continuously furthered the democratic peace promise. That is, pluralists employed a now highly common rhetorical strategy, whereby they pointed to gaps between (their) democratic ideals and the social realities of oligarchic Britain. Put differently, their critique only reinforced democratization and democratic peace as a horizon of expectation (Gadamer, 1960: 356–357). Using Gadamer, we may argue that pluralism saliently contributed to the establishment of democratization and democratic peace as an emancipatory iteration of this concept of a horizon of expectation. This concept, in enabling (activist) theory to be understood as an ongoing dialogical project (Kelly, 2011: 31) and recognizing theorists as always-situated

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agents who revisit earlier works to rethink and modernize the available political vocabulary, develops answers to troubling political questions against the background of ever-changing socio-political circumstances (Gadamer, 1960; Kosselleck, 1989). Theorizing is then not an independent scholarly pursuit devoted foremost to the creation of a coherent body of thought, but a project that can be linked to democratic criticism. Actualizations of peculiar traditions are then legitimate as long as it is clear where the historical reconstruction ends and the actualization begins (Lane, 2012).

Pluralism and Liberal Democratic Peace Theory If theorizing is a practice that co-constructs, reflects and perhaps seeks to change “real-world” developments, it is likely that theoretical changes occur due to both “real-world” and intra-theoretical developments, or conjunctures between them (Guzzini, 2000: 150; Zundel & Kokkalis, 2010). Hence, to understand the development of the classical pluralist tradition, it is important to mind different political and scientific changes. They include the experience of democratic self-destruction and reconstruction in Europe, very careful attempts at democratization during decolonization, and new concerns with human rights and the stability of representative democracy within academia and among policymakers. While the pluralists continued to formulate pleas for substantial democratization processes in view of these developments, and to infiltrate re-created international organizations (Cole, 1971; Mitrany, 1947; 1954: 277), the standing of their approach nevertheless came to lose visibility and prestige relative to liberal IR theory. In what follows, I posit three trends in post-1945 international thought as critically underpinning the contemporaneous divergence from engaged, civil society-focused theorizing of the democratic peace. I then point to nascent but promising revivals of pluralist concerns in European—specifically, British and German—political theory to point to a potential reclaiming of democratic peace theory (Hobson et al., 2011). The first trend concerns the introduction of a new, topic-related division of labour in IR liberalism between, broadly speaking, 1945 and 1975. Liberals have shown continued interest in the taken forms and impacts of civil society activism. But they based theoretical claims on histories of the abolitionist movement rather than of trade unionism (Nye & Keohane, 1971), and shifted attention to civil society as an agent of

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democratization in authoritarian states. By implication, the consolidation of representative democracy puts an end to civil societies’ democratizing impact (Finnemore & Sikkink, 1998; Risse et al., 2012). Furthermore, and perhaps most important, civil society remains unconsidered in liberal democratic peace theorizing, even in contexts where the peace-promoting qualities of capitalism and international trade are emphasized (Caranti, 2018). The second trend relates to positivism’s rise at the expense of “traditional” or qualitative approaches in international thought in the 1950/60s (Hollis, 1990: 38). The positivism sidelined the activist and normative theorizing developed by the pluralists in favour of quantitative approaches, newly legitimated by science in 1950 onwards. The origin story of democratic peace theory speaks compelling to this trend (Hobson, 2017). Liberals began to gather quantitative evidence attesting both to the Wilsonian hope of democracies as war-averting at their core and to causal claims asserting democracy, international interdependence and membership in international organizations as engendering peace (Oneal et al., 2003). Liberal considerations and datasets at times even include early twentieth-century democracies such as Britain after the introduction of the secret ballot box (1875) (Russett, 1993: 15), and there is little debate about the democratic qualities of post-1945 representative democracies (Russett, 1993: 122). Finally, against the backdrop of political claims speaking to democratic peace in times of liberal triumphalism from the 1990s onwards, academic liberals have since qualified the tenets of democratic peace theory, which holds that democratization leads to peace. When they argue that democratization can lead to war, in particular when the elites of young democracies ignore checks and balances (Mansfield & Snyder, 1995), their implication is that the thesis’ core policy proposition, democracy promotion, is, at best, an ambivalent conduct. Though this academic intervention was meant as a critique of liberal triumphalism, it somewhat revives classical liberal fears of democratization and has added to declining trust in democracy in the academic realm. As indicated, these ruptures contributed both to a demise of the pluralist tradition and the normalization of a certain conception of democratic peace theory—namely, one that casts it as a liberal endeavour linked to IR rather than IPT, which itself has developed into a transdisciplinary but highly abstract project that lacks concrete analysis of oligarchy or

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structures of domination (Deitelhoff & Daase, 2015). Reclaiming democratic peace theory or linking IPT perspectives to concrete analysis in the sense of “applied theory” may correct for these developments (Theuns, 2019). The good news is that we do not need to begin anew, as there exist normative critiques of democratic peace theory onto which we can build (Czempiel, 1996; Hobson, 2017; Niederberger, 2016: 109). These critiques reclaim democracy as an emancipatory term within democratic peace theory while minding that none of us has ever seen a perfect democracy. In effect, they reject those liberal arguments based on the underlying assumption that there are democracies. Indeed, some corresponding datasets have even included early twentieth-century Britain, notwithstanding its oligarchic rather than democratic nature, as the preceding historical section has shown. After the introduction of more substantial definitions of democracy, few or no states would qualify for such a dataset. By implication, further debate about definitions of democracy in (liberal) democratic peace theorizing may evolve, especially with regard to socioeconomic (in-)equality and civic activism. These debates may contribute to IPT as a socio-politically informed endeavour. Furthermore, IPT perspectives may identify maldevelopments, lacunas or contestable assumptions. One already identifiable maldevelopment concerns the marginalization of civil society and transnationalism within liberal democratic peace theory. To be sure, liberal democratic peace theory is a huge body of thought, and there has been occasional acknowledgement of the crucial role of citizens, civic “checks and balances”, the opposition and media, which some may argue as indirect consideration of civil society actors. Still, these references do not straightforwardly address civil society “activism” and transnational loyalties as a necessary precondition to and ingredient of democratic peace. Indeed, even within “cultural” explanations, the maldevelopment persists. Liberals have only argued that democratic elites embrace democratic, compromise-envisioning norms and therefore behave as peacepromoting in international relations (Geis, 2001: 286–290). Liberals thus have marginalized the fact of citizens’ lack of any chance to interfere with executive decisions about war and peace, while neither considering political and civil participation in studied democracies (Czempiel, 1996: 83). Only recently, this maldevelopment has been addressed in new emphasis on an active civil society’s status as the mainstay of democracy, a status derived from its checking of prerogative state power and making of

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politicians accountable to social constituencies, even between elections (Bernhard et al., 2020: 4; Caranti, 2018: 15). One might add to this valuable correction that the civil society activism now emphasized must unfold transnationally to allow for the kind of democratic deliberation and peace-promoting lobbying that might put additional constraints on possibly conflict-attuned political elites (Nye & Keohane, 1971). Finally, international political theory perspectives may deal with contestable assumptions within democratic peace theory or liberal theory at large. Within IR, liberals have shifted the focus away from trade unionism by theorizing the abolitionist movement into a paradigmatic example for democracy-enhancing civil society activism (Finnemore & Sikkink, 1998). Furthermore, the fall of the Berlin Wall has been conceptualized as an achievement of a pro-liberal civil society (Carothers & Ottaway, 2000: 7; Porta, 2016). Liberals hence conceive of civil society assistance in transformative states as a means to educate citizens about representative democracy and to create a counterweight to the state institutions that at best remain minimal (Carothers, 2009: 6; Kurki, 2013). A theoretical perspective here can further contestation of quickly made liberal assumptions. Pro-democratic civil society activism in transformative states is most often about socio-economic demands, which implies that bottom-up democratization cannot be furthered only through assistance for organizations that resemble tightly organized Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Holthaus, 2019). The aforementioned pluralist Mitrany, an emigre scholar from Romania, already noted that we cannot easily apply our theoretical and ideological lenses to societies beyond the Western European core. Instead, he argued, consideration of non-Western struggles ought to become incorporated into our theories, if not serve as important sources of their inspiration. He considered his detailed critique of where Marxist theories went wrong in their consideration of South-Eastern Europe as his most important theoretical contribution (Mitrany, 1956).

Conclusion In this paper, I have approached IPT as democratic theory through a revision of the British pluralist tradition. The approach allows seeing a long but partly forgotten pre-history to IPT, and the merit of practicebased rather than highly abstract theorizing. Although abstract theorizing undoubtedly has a role to play within IPT, as a core orientation it risks

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the theory’s end in self-referential and somewhat elitist debates. Against this backdrop, I proposed that IPT may also become a space for new thinking about democratic peace and the structural, political and particular obstacles that hinder progress towards this horizon of expectation. Such thinking may start with real-world observations, continue established critiques of liberal democratic peace theory, or take on the form of normative analysis or “applied theory”. By making this argument, I join the chorus of those who argue that IPT should be linked to, or be informed by, analysis of oligarchy and other structures of socio-political domination. The pluralist thinkers who I have re-introduced to provide an important source of inspiration, particularly in their arguments that persistent oligarchy serves as the main obstacle to democracy both within and beyond nation states. By implication, they invite understandings of democratic peace not as “something measurable that is already there”, as liberals do, but as an emancipatory horizon of expectation. By means of historical reconstruction, I have shown that pluralists such as Hobhouse, Cole and Mitrany contrasted democracy and oligarchy, that they put emphasis on democratic participation and civil society activism and that they reflected upon transnationalism as a necessary ingredient of a coming democratic peace. On this view, democratic peace theory opens up an intellectual space to gauge progress towards more egalitarian societies. Pluralist democratic peace theory is hence very different from liberal reformulations in IR, and we may conceive of these liberal theories as the rupture that put a temporary end to normative theories within IR, or international political theorizing.

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Recchia, S. (2018). Should humanitarian interveners promote democracy after genocide? International Theory, 10(1), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1017/S17 52971917000173. Risse, T., Jetschke, A., & Schmitz, H. P. (2012). Internationale Normen, kommunikatives Handeln und innenpolitischer Wandel. In T. Risse, A. Jetschke, & H. P. Schmitz (Eds.), Die Macht der Menschenrechte. Internationale Normen, kommunikatives Handeln und innenpolitischer Wandel in den Ländern des Südens (pp. 11–48). Nomos. Root, E. (1917). The effect of democracy on international law. In A. A. f. I. Conciliation (Ed.). Russett, B. (1993). Grasping the democratic peace: Principles for a post-War World. Princeton University Press. Saward, M. (2011). Slow theory: Taking time over transnational democratic representation. Ethics & Global Politics, 4(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10. 3402/egp.v4i1.6416. Smith, H. (2000). Why is there no international democratic theory? In H. Smith (Ed.), Democracy and international relations: Critical theories, problematic practices (pp. 1–30). Palgrave. Sylvest, C. (2007). Beyond the state? Pluralism and internationalism in early twentieth-century Britain. International Relations, 21(1), 67–85. https://doi. org/10.1177/0047117807073768. Theuns, T. (2019). The legitimacy of free trade agreements as tools of EU democracy promotion. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 32(1), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2018.1552247. Tilly, C. (2007). Democracy. Cambridge University Press. Toqueville, A. (1998 [1835/1840]). Democracy in America. Herdsfordshire: Wordsworth. Wallace, W. (1996). Truth and power, monks and technocrats: Theory and practice in international relations. Review of International Studies, 22(3), 301–321. https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021050011856X. Winters, J. A., & Page, B. I. (2009). Oligarchy in the United States? Perspectives on Politics, 7 (4), 731–751. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/404 07076. Woolf, L. (1933). What is Democracy? In M. Adams (Ed.), The Modern State (pp. 15–27). Kennikat Press. Zundel, M., & Kokkalis, P. (2010). Theorizing as engaged practice. Organization Studies, 31(9–10), 1209–1227. https://doi.org/10.1177/017084061 0374405.

CHAPTER 6

Practice Approaches in International Political Theory Maren Hofius

Abstract This chapter deals with the question of ‘how we ought to go on’ in a world that is characterised by cultural pluralism and uncertainty. To that end, it explores how practice approaches in International Political Theory have recently highlighted the centrality of ‘practical judgement’ in guiding actors’ moral reasoning. ‘Practical judgement’ thus conceived turns out as an important element in advancing a practiceminded ethics, which discards moral reasoning based on a priori fixed principles and instead foregrounds humans’ experiential dimension as a source for the normative evaluation of practices. Along these lines, practices are normative and the decision of how we ‘ought to’ go on in the world is as practical an affair as it is deeply infused with ethical questions of how to do ‘good’. In combining analytical and normative enquiries into global politics, such practice-minded ethics promises to reconcile

M. Hofius (B) Department of Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Paipais (ed.), Perspectives on International Political Theory in Europe, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77274-1_6

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the long-standing division between International Political Theory and International Relations. Keywords International Practice Theory · Practice turn · Practice · Practical judgement · Moral reasoning

Prologue, or How the Postman Always Rings Twice Except for sharing the same acronym ‘IPT’, International Political Theory and International Practice Theory1 have hardly entertained a point of commonality since the advent of the ‘practice turn’ in the late 2000s (Adler & Pouliot, 2011a; Pouliot, 2008; for an earlier call to ‘return’ practice to International Relations see Neumann [2002]). Rather, the two fields of study seem to perpetuate the neat ‘division of labour’ between scholars of normative International Relations (IR) theory and IR constructivism, which Erskine (2012: 457) criticised a decade ago when reviewing Price (2008) and his fellow constructivist theorists’ attempt to address the ethical challenges in international relations. Back then, Erskine’s (2012: 450) diagnosis was unequivocal: ‘they [empirically minded constructivists] struggle to […] provide both guidance for “how we should act” and a basis for assessing moral progress in world politics’. In similar ways to IR constructivism, International Practice Theory has struggled to come to terms with uncovering the normative underpinnings of practices and developing a set of normative standards from which the prevailing practices of global politics can be evaluated and judged. The majority of IR practice scholars have enquired into the ‘is’ of world politics, while safely bracketing questions of the ‘ought’ and leaving these to normative IR theory. The recent upsurge in IR scholarship (e.g. Adler, 2019; Lechner & Frost, 2018; Ralph, 2018; Ralph & Gifkins, 2017; Wiener, 2018) that seeks to bridge the divide between practice approaches and normative theory presents a promising turning point and vindicates the proverbial wisdom that ‘the postman always rings twice’. In part, the opening towards ethical enquiry has been driven by IR practice scholars (re)discovering their intellectual roots of classical pragmatism. Yet, it has also been spurred by IR constructivists exploring the norms-practice nexus as well as normative IR theorists directly engaging with IR’s ‘practice turn’.

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This momentum of fruitful dialogue across IR’s intra-disciplinary divides should be seized. It should be seen as a unique opportunity to realize International Political Theory’s initial call to close the artificially created divide between empirical and normative enquiry (Brown, 2018: 48), and conceive of International Political Theory as a field in which to think about the practical and normative questions of world politics in tandem. I develop my argument in two steps. In a first step, I briefly sketch the history of the ‘practice turn’ in IR to demonstrate how practice theorists initially devised the study of ordinary language and practice as an empirical-analytical rather than a norm-theoretical endeavour. As practice theorists faced increasing criticism over their neglect of the evaluative dimension of practices, scholars from both IR practice theory and normative theory started to squarely address the normativity of practices. In this light, I outline in a second step three distinct approaches that use the concept of ‘practical judgement’ to underline that questions of the ‘ought’ are inseparable from the ‘is’: (1) Brown’s Neo-Aristotelian approach and treatment of praxis requiring phronesis; (2) Frost and Lechner’s Wittgensteinian understanding of practice as rule-following; and (3) Ralph’s Deweyian ‘pragmatic constructivist ethics’. Some brush-clearing is required to link my endeavour to this volume’s aspiration to provide a European perspective on International Political Theory. It might strike some readers as misplaced to talk about a distinctly European perspective on International Political Theory, if the latter’s reasoning has been argued to be ‘deeply embedded in at least Western political thought’ (Brown, 2010: 6). Narrowing down the remit of International Political Theory to a geographically distinct—however ambiguously defined—area of Europe all too readily smacks of the Eurocentrism that IR scholars, who are mindful of Europe’s colonial history, wish to avoid. Writing, as I do, about IR practice theory’s rediscovery of its pragmatist roots might reduce a ‘European’ perspective even more to an absurdity as most theoretical insights have been derived from classical American pragmatism. Yet, it would be premature to brush over the significant influence that classical works from Ancient Greek political philosophy as well as contemporary continental philosophy and social theory have exerted over the development of practice-theoretical approaches in IR theory. More than that, the push to recover the normative dimension of international practices has been principally advanced by scholars located at European universities in opposition to Anglo-American developments towards ‘mainstreaming’ practice theorising.

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The Practice Turn’s Normative Road Not Taken From its very inception, practice theorists in IR have aspired to zoom in on the mundane or everyday practices of practitioners to understand how global politics works ‘in practice’ (Adler & Pouliot, 2011b: 3). Losing themselves in abstract theorising was thought incompatible with the premise of the ‘practice turn’ to provide a more worldly and peopled account. ‘Doing’ practice-theory was meant to understand and reconstruct practices from the practitioners’ point of view, not to ruminate on the normative implications of practices for world politics and engage in scholarly critique (Pouliot & Cornut, 2015: 301–302; see also Neumann & Pouliot, 2011: 114). How practitioners ‘should’ act in a given situation, it was feared, would lead away from the tacit background knowledge from which actors ‘could’ engage in meaningful action in the first place (Pouliot, 2008: 275, 277). In the early days, when ‘practice turners’ (Cornut, 2017) were preoccupied with defining what ‘counts’ as practice theory in the IR landscape, they were primarily demarcating practice theory from what we might call its ‘significant other’, that is, IR constructivism and its subfield of norms research. In their reading, norm-oriented constructivism had falsely promoted the image of the rule- or norm-compliant agent who acts pursuant to a ‘logic of appropriateness’. In Pouliot’s (2008) groundbreaking piece on the ‘logic of practicality’, he criticised such portrayals as overly deterministic. For most of the time, he argued, actors engaged in the world against the background of ‘inarticulate know-how’ (Pouliot, 2008: 258), without consciously reflecting on which explicit rule or norm to follow. In similar ways, Bueger and Gadinger (2018: 111) criticised constructivists for treating norms as fixed entities and analysing these independent of their practice, that is, decoupled from their use in context. As a result, constructivist norm scholars were held to reduce actors to ‘judgemental dopes’ who follow a norm on autopilot (ibid.). While such practice-theoretical critique was justified, it necessarily only held purchase for norms research under the banner of IR’s ‘conventional’ constructivism (see, paradigmatically, Checkel, 2001, 2005; Finnemore & Sikkink, 1998; Risse, 2000). It neglected developments in ‘critical constructivist’ norms research that adopted a relational rather than behaviourist approach to norms to foreground a norm’s inherently dual and contested quality. In this line of thought, a norm’s meaning is

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always ‘in use’ (Puetter & Wiener, 2009: 10; Wiener, 2004: 202; 2007a: 6; 2007b: 49; 2008: 57). Regardless of these developments, IR practice theorists’ conclusion was to ontologically prioritise practices over norms so that the idea to either explore the evaluative dimension of practices or the practical nature of norms was a road not taken.

The Normativity of Practices in Contemporary Social Theory To be sure, normativity of practices had been prominently addressed in Schatzki et al.’s (2001) seminal edited volume The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory that subsequently spurred the various ‘practice turns’ in cognate disciplines. Schatzki (2001: 60) argued that a practice is not only organised by a set of rules and shared understandings of how to accomplish a practice; it is also organised by ‘a normative “teleoaffective structure”’. One year later, he specified this teleoaffective structure and defined it as a range of normativized and hierarchically ordered ends, projects, and tasks, to varying degrees allied with normativized emotions and even moods. By “normativity,” I mean, first, oughtness and, beyond this, acceptability. The indefinite range of end-project-task combinations contained in a practice’s teleoaffective structure and realized in participants’ doings and sayings are either ones that participants ought to realize or ones that it is acceptable for them to do so. (Schatzki, 2002: 80)

From Schatzki we thus learn that knowing how we ‘ought’ to go on is bound up in the very act of carrying out a practice. Crucially, however, this practice-based conception of normativity does not imply ‘oughtness’ in the sense that it is generalisable across time and space by ‘exhibited regularities or presupposed rules’, the philosopher Rouse (2007: 48) has detailed. Such an understanding falsely invokes either a regulist or regularist conception of norms: A regulist conception of norms, known since Plato and espoused by deontologists such as Kant, holds that following a norm presupposes an explicit rule that regulates or ‘determines’ how a practice is correctly carried out (Brandom, 1994: 19). Regularism, as found in Bourdieu’s practice theory, acknowledges the existence of implicit rules and norms in practices, but is not interested in how their normative content shapes conceptions of correct

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or incorrect conduct. Its sole intention is to identify a regularity of practices (Brandom, 1994: 28). So in contrast to both Kantian regulism and Bourdieusian regularism, practice theorists like Rouse have advanced a normative conception of practices, arguing that […] the normativity of practices is expressed not by a determinate norm to which they are accountable but instead in the mutual accountability of their constitutive performances to issues and stakes whose definitive resolution is always prospective. (Rouse, 2007: 51, emphasis MH)

It follows that the normativity of practices as envisaged by the above practice theorists is necessarily situated and evolves as participants in a practice continuously probe whether their enactment is still in accordance with the communally negotiated standard of a competent performance. The question of whether a practice is competently performed can therefore not be answered with reference to either an a priori fixed rule or the simple regularity of conforming to a rule. It depends entirely on the evaluative judgement of a community to which participants in a practice belong.

From Competence to ‘Ethical Competence’ The notion of ‘competence’ has been at the core of IR’s ‘practice turn’. Adler and Pouliot (2011a: 6) prominently defined practices as ‘competent performances’ where ‘(in)competence is never inherent but attributed in and through social relations. The notion of performance implies that of a public, of an audience able to appraise the practice’ (2011a: 7). The centrality of a given community’s act of recognising and morally judging a performance as ‘competent’ was therefore intrinsic to the definition of practice. In her contribution to Adler and Pouliot’s International Practices, Gross Stein (2011: 90) was clear in stating that ‘[w]hat is considered “competent” at any moment in time and space is a normative judgment. It reflects not only “what we do,” but “what we think we should do,” and “how we think about what we should do”’. Ironically, such early links between ‘competence’ and its evaluative—indeed reflexive—dimension were not systematically followed up. Rather than exploring in more depth the labour and possibly even the contestation involved in negotiating ‘what should be done’, IR practice theorists preferred studying how the pre-reflexive regularities of practices reproduce existing power structures in the international system (Pouliot, 2016).

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Gadinger (2016) was the first ‘practice turner’ himself to squarely investigate the normative dimension of practices by drawing on Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology and sociology of critique. Yet, it was Ralph and Gifkin’s (2017) sweeping criticism of Adler-Nissen and Pouliot’s (2014) analysis of the 2011 United Nations (UN) mandated Libya intervention that became the most vocal call for engaging more thoroughly with the normative ends of practices. In Ralph and Gifkins’ view, Adler-Nissen and Pouliot (2014) convincingly carved out how diplomats from the ‘P3’ states (France, the United Kingdom and the United States) had successfully pushed for a UN Security Council resolution authorising the use of force. But they defined the diplomatic ‘competence’ to end mass atrocities merely along ‘professional’ standards (Ralph & Gifkins, 2017: 632). In doing so, they disregarded the demand for what Frost (2009) calls ‘ethical competence’. They ignored the broader normative environment and ‘community of practice’ within which a performance is judged to be competent (Ralph & Gifkins, 2017: 637). From their decidedly ethical perspective, Ralph and Gifkins (2017: 633) demonstrate that P3 diplomats proved ethically incompetent as their success in ‘penholding’ had failed to elicit a sustainable consensus for implementing any future action under the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ norm from other UN Security Council members. Ralph and Gifkins’ intervention stands representative for a growing number of IR scholars who specifically criticise Bourdieusian practice theory in IR for reproducing dominant international practices rather than critically assessing their normative consequences. As a result, these scholars either explicitly or implicitly seek to end the artificial division of explanatory (‘is’) and normative theory (‘ought’) prevailing in IR practice theory and the IR discipline more broadly. A first group of scholars who take issue with this divorce includes IR constructivist scholars that have long been exploring the role of norms in international relations, and especially the co-constitutive relationship between norms and practices. They now see the developing field of International Practice Theory as a welcome anchor point to study norms through a practice-sensitive lens, be it their emergence, change or their inherently contested meaning (Bode & Huelss, 2018; Bode & Karlsrud, 2019; Lesch, 2017; Niemann, 2018; Wiener, 2014, 2018).

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To evaluate whether this change also creates better practices, another but related strand of IR theorists specifically takes an interest in international ethics through a return to American pragmatism and twentiethcentury philosophy (Lechner & Frost, 2018; Ralph, 2018; Ralph & Gifkins, 2017; for the possibility of critique of international practices see Schindler & Wille, 2019).2 Common to these scholars is their desire to identify a standpoint from which to evaluate international practices without, however, formulating ready-made criteria for moral judgement that are purportedly impartial and external to one’s own research endeavour. Doing so would invoke Kantian moral law, which posits a universally valid yardstick along which humans decide on what ‘ought to be done’. Contrary then to Kantian ethics, they want to avoid ‘the [externalist] view from nowhere’ (Nagel cited in Kratochwil, 2011: 57; Lechner & Frost, 2018: 35) and start ‘in the midst’ of those evaluative standards that prevail in a given community. In sum, the above group of scholars no longer content themselves with recovering the social in global politics by zooming in on mundane practices. They also call for uncovering the normative quality and evaluative standards that are bound up with these practices. For this to succeed, they seek to return and do justice to Price and Reus-Smit’s initial call to furnish constructivism’s empirical research agenda with ethical guidance on how we ought to go on and achieve ‘moral progress’ in the world (Price, 2008; Ralph, 2018: 174; Reus-Smit, 2008). That first constructivism and now practice theory as the ‘new constructivism’ (McCourt, 2016) have for long failed to take up their calls and bridge the divide between explanatory and normative theory is now coming back to haunt them.

International Political Theory as Agora The above-raised concerns by IR scholars fall into line with the prime objective of International Political Theory, which is to return to an IR discipline that does not privilege explanatory theory over normative theory, and vice versa (Brown, 2018: 48). More than that, their emphasis on ‘practical judgement’ posits a productive opening towards merging practice approaches with normative theory. This opening must be seized, as it represents a unique opportunity for International Political Theory to serve as an agora 3 in which to think about the question of ‘how should we act’ practically. Due to limited space, I shall cursorily outline

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three proposals of how to conduct normative IR theorising in view of the primacy of practice in moral reasoning. While the first two propositions—Brown’s (2010, 2012) phronetic International Political Theory and Frost and Lechner’s (2016a, 2016b, 2018) Wittgensteinian account of international practices—originate in normative IR theory and seek to engage with IR practice theorists more thoroughly, the third comes from the IR constructivist Ralph (2018), who seeks to furnish constructivism with a Deweyan pragmatist ethics, and thereby builds bridges between IR constructivism, practice theory and normative theory. What unites all three advances is their opposition to both regulism and regularism. As an alternative, the below outlined theorists wish to construct an ethics that is grounded in the concrete human experience that unfolds in (diverse!) patterns of interaction that exceed in meaning any form of regularity. Moral reasoning must therefore be practical as well as situated. It can never be reduced to universal and fixed commandments nor to mere habit, for this would pre-empt the creativity through which practical judgement can be exercised. Differences between their envisaged ethics exist, however. To better understand what practical judgement means and how understandings differ, I will distinguish the accounts with regard to their definition and purpose of practices as well as the degree of reflexivity required to exercise judgement.

Brown’s Phronetic International Political Theory Throughout his scholarly career, Brown has engaged with the concept of ‘practical judgement’ to devise how international political theorising could become more ‘practically-minded’ again after moral reasoning falsely became too ‘theory-centred’ from the early seventeenth century onwards (Brown, 2010: 9; 2012: 446). As one of the most renowned scholars and avid promoters of International Political Theory, he has therefore aimed at returning to a ‘phronetic international relations theory’ whose moral reasoning is influenced by Aristotle’s notion of phronesis, one of Aristotle’s three virtues of thought that translates as prudence or practical wisdom (Brown, 2012: 445). As he details by quoting Aristotle, [p]hronesis is about deliberation on “the truth, involving reason, concerned with action about things that are good or bad for a human being” [...]; it is about “knowledge of particulars, since it is concerned with action and action is about particulars”. (ibid.)

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Brown’s moral reasoning must therefore be understood as neoAristotelian since he is not only influenced by Aristotle’s ‘virtue ethics’ of leading the ‘good life’, but also by his notion of ‘praxis’ meaning purposeful action. In virtue ethics, to know ‘what is the right thing to do’ derives from being a virtuous person. It follows that, here, the question is not ‘“what should we do?” but “what kind of person ought we to be?”, or, in the classical formulation, “how should one live?”’ (Brown, 2010: 80). Faced with a moral conundrum, humans reason against the background of how the virtuous human being would appropriately act, not against ‘a set of maxims’ or ‘by reference to the consequences of his or her actions’, as deontologists or utilitarians suggest, respectively (ibid.). Learning how to act virtuously cannot be accomplished through mere teaching on the spot, though. Instead, it takes lifelong training, experience and active engagement in a specific community context since the virtuous human being first needs to develop the capacities that enable him or her to reason and act appropriately or competently (ibid.: 88; Brown, 2012: 442, 447). The open question is how the process of practical reasoning or judgement in a specific moral dilemma unfolds. Crucially, for Brown (2010: 232–233), ethics requires a ‘form of judgment that constitutes a creative interaction between the standard criteria and the full specifics of the particular case’. Criteria or principles may provide some initial guidance towards determining which action is competent, but in the end, the judgement rests on the ‘human capacity to reason’ (Brown, 2012: 446). The emphasis on conscious and self-reflexive reasoning becomes most visible when Brown compares Aristotle’s approach to virtuous action with Bourdieu’s pre-reflexive take on competent performances. ‘For Bourdieu’, Brown (2012: 441, emphasis MH) explicates, competent performance is largely based on habit in one form or another, and the importance of the reasoning power of the agent, although not excluded from consideration, should not be overemphasised. For Aristotle, reason is central; the virtuous individual may seem to be acting on the basis of habit, but this habitual knowledge is developed consciously through processes of reasoning.

It follows that leading the virtuous life is intellectually demanding: Practical judgement requires not only the explicit deliberation based on reason, it is also premised on the lifelong cultivation of virtues.

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Brown’s neo-Aristotelian ethics has been criticised for the elitism inherent in phronesis. Hutchings (2019: 48–49) finds that requirements, such as self-reflexivity, ‘relevant’ knowledge and experience, lead Brown to place (too much) confidence in the ruling elite’s capacity to make the right judgement, while neglecting the possibility of humanity as a whole to know how to lead the ‘good life’ (ibid.: 49–52). Frost and Lechner (2016a: 348), two advocates of Wittgensteinian rule-following, equally denounce phronetic international relations as too elitist. More than this, however, they criticise Aristotelian phronesis for putting ‘wise’ people’s situational weighing of possible consequences over ‘blind’ rulefollowing (Frost & Lechner, 2016a: 348–349). Aristotle, they argue, does not ignore the general importance of rules, but these are regularly discarded ‘whenever the judgement of wise people clashes with the rules’ (ibid.: 349). In stark contrast to Brown, Frost and Lechner adopt a Wittgensteinian view on judgement, arguing that ‘social rules matter not as abstract propositions but as an ongoing activity of rule-following: such activity implies judgement’ (ibid.).

Frost and Lechner’s Wittgensteinian Approach to International Practices Frost and Lechner’s (2016a, 2016b, 2018) Wittgensteinian account of international practices entails a clear commitment to practical judgement. In this respect it rightfully deserves a place in the here presented triad of approaches which advocate practice-minded moral reasoning in International Political Theory. It needs to be stated at the outset, however, that a Wittgensteinian approach to practices does not entail an ethics in the strict sense of the term. Frost and Lechner’s account is important nonetheless, for it serves as a corrective to the Aristotelian understanding of practice and provides crucial insights into norms as the evaluative standards of practices. Frost and Lechner belong to some of the most vocal critics of IR ‘practice turners’, such as Adler and Pouliot. While in principle sympathising with IR’s turn to practice, they, inter alia, criticise Bourdieusian practice theorists for adopting the Aristotelian conception of praxis that arguably lacks the social aspect of action, that is, meaning shared within the context of a practice. As an ‘individual-level action’ that is carried out on a specific occasion (Frost & Lechner, 2016a: 342), it cannot capture the social standards that guide agents in their everyday practices. Praxis is therefore

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void of normativity. Different from Aristotle or neo-Aristotelians such as Brown, Frost and Lechner’s Wittgensteinian conception of practice starts from the premise ‘that social action is, at base, normatively constituted action’ (Frost & Lechner, 2016a: 344). This means that to know what a person ‘ought to do’ in a situation, he or she needs to take into account the actions of others that have participated in the self-same practice (ibid.). At the root of every practice is thus a social standard, that is, a norm that governs participants in their joint doings. These meaningfully shared social standards Frost and Lechner call ‘rules’ so that a social practice always implies that action is carried out against the however implicit background of a shared set of rules (Frost & Lechner, 2016a: 345). ‘To act’, Frost and Lechner hold, ‘is to follow the social rules of a practice: rule-following is at once the logical and normative basis of practices’ (ibid.). Rule-following in the Wittgensteinian sense must be further qualified. These rules are not only ‘constitutive rules’ in the sense that they define how a practice is meaningfully and, thus, correctly carried out. Contrary to Aristotle’s virtuous acting based on reason, rule-following is also done ‘blindly’ and without recourse to reasons. Recall one of Wittgenstein’s most famous phrases in Philosophical Investigations when he writes, ‘When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly’ (Wittgenstein & Anscombe, 1989: 219). ‘This is simply what I do’, he quips two paragraphs earlier, implying that it is impossible to explain or give reasons, for the rule only exists by virtue of it being practised or in use (Bloor, 2001: 110). Rules and practices therefore entertain a circular relationship: ‘rules are institutions and rulefollowing [sic] is participation in the relevant institutional practices’ (ibid.: 112). It follows that practices are always social; they cannot be enacted in private, but must be publicly enacted in an institutional or communal context of participants. As a result, the purpose of a practice can never be defined in a one-off fashion where an individual weighs the consequences of a potential course of action without recourse to a standard. Instead, the ends of a practice must be aligned with the social rules (institutions) that define its purpose and legitimacy (Frost & Lechner, 2016a: 345, 349).

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Dewey’s ‘Situation Ethics’ and Ralph’s Adaptation of IR Constructivism Wittgenstein’s rule-following has much in common with Dewey’s classical pragmatism. Both scholars had an anti-elitist or anti-intellectualist outlook on life, staunchly argued against propositional knowledge guiding our everyday practices and emphasised the centrality of context for practices and rules to acquire their relevant meaning. Principles as such, Dewey held, do not develop any ‘normative force’ on their own; their ultimate validity is decided when used in a concrete situation (Pappas, 2008: 49). Judgement by the agent is therefore needed and this judgement must be practical: No hard and fast rules decide whether a meaning suggested is the right and proper meaning to follow up. The individual’s own good (or bad) judgment is the guide. There is no label, on any given idea or principle, that says automatically, “Use me in this situation” — as the magic cakes of Alice in Wonderland were inscribed “Eat me.” The thinker has to decide, to choose. (Dewey, 1933: 125)

Attending to a doctrine of a rule’s ‘meaning-in-use’ to determine the ‘right’ judgement also marks the cornerstone of a Wittgensteinian understanding of rule-governed action (Lechner & Frost, 2018: 22). While Dewey and Wittgenstein can therefore be said to have shared some form of radical contextualism and experientialism, they had different ideas on how the process of moral reasoning towards judgement unfolds. Both underlined that moral reasoning is a social process that cannot be undertaken in solitude. Yet, while Wittgenstein foregrounded the implicit character of moral reasoning qua ‘blind’ rule-following, Dewey envisaged a more holistic conception of moral deliberation, featuring conscious reasoning next to experimentation, emotions and imagination (Pappas, 2008: 101). In fact, individuals’ moral reasoning arguably comes close to a staged ‘communal dialogue’ (Pappas, 2008: 99). In Dewey’s (1922: 315) understanding, ‘we rehearse the responses of others just as we dramatically enact other consequences. We foreknow how others will act, and the foreknowledge is the beginning of judgment passed on action’. This imaginary form of intelligently assessing the consequences of a potential action shares affinities with Aristotle’s conscious

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and self-reflective reasoning. However, by demonstrating how individuals explicitly take into account the positions and actions of other participants in a practice, Dewey made plain how morality is shot through with the social. What is more, in Dewey’s view, morality must be understood as experience (Pappas, 2008: 81). Moral norms can never develop independently of human experience, but crucially ‘grow out of, and exert their normative force from, the moral inquiries that occur in the stream of situations that constitute our moral life’ (Pappas, 2008: 75, emphasis MH). Situations and, thus, context become the defining factors in leading to a practical judgement (Dewey, 1891: 199–200). What follows from this is that the normative standard against which a practice comes to be judged as morally ‘right’ or ‘good’ is ‘formed in the process of practical judgment or valuation. It is not something taken from outside and applied within it [...]’ (Dewey, 1915: 519, emphasis MH). The ends and means of a practical judgement are therefore always entwined and embedded in the concrete situation. What ‘ought’ to be done in such a situation, Dewey was convinced, does not only depend on the ‘is’, but ‘it is itself the “is” of action’ (Dewey, 1891: 202). Ethics in this view is not tied to some fixed end as defined, for example, by Aristotle’s ‘good life’. Much to the contrary, Dewey’s radical contextualism led him to argue that the answer to ‘how we should live’ lies in how we align ends and means in the concrete situation. The actual answer necessarily remains a ‘hypothesis’ that only gives tentative, not definitive clues of how a better life could be lived (Pappas, 2008: 73). This anti-foundationalist ethics is what has enticed the IR constructivist scholar Ralph to treat globally operating norms as ‘hypotheses’ whose value is not ‘absolute’, but always at stake in the concrete instance of its use (Ralph, 2018: 175). Ralph is not the only IR scholar to find worth in importing key premises of Dewey’s classical pragmatism into IR theory (see e.g. Bargués, 2020; Bueger & Edmunds, 2021; Pratt, 2020; Sundaram & Thakur, 2019). Yet, he is the first to harness Dewey’s situational ethics for developing an explicitly ‘pragmatic constructivist’ ethical standpoint. In concreto, Ralph wishes to advance a constructivist standpoint by which he is able to judge and, indeed, test whether the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) norm can ‘ameliorate lived social problems’, such as mass atrocities in global politics (Ralph, 2018: 175). To assess whether R2P and its multifarious interpretations can lead to a

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sustainable end of violence, the researcher is tasked to weigh its consequences—not in the classical realist sense, but by creatively imagining the ‘community of practice’, within which judgement is called for, as an ‘assembly’ or ‘tribunal’ ‘which discusses and appraises proposed and performed acts’ (Dewey, 1922: 315; see also Ralph, 2018: 189). From this imagined communal dialogue, it follows that a norm’s ‘authority’ and recognition can never lie in the abstract, but must be grounded in the multiple voices that attest to its practical usefulness in mitigating harm (Ralph, 2018: 186). Just as much as democracy served as a moral ideal for Dewey, norms in the abstract can function as an ideal; but to probe their validity, they must be subjected to the moral test of experience.

Epilogue In this chapter, I have argued that practical judgement represents a productive focal point for IR practice theorists and political theorists to jointly think about ‘how to go on’ in a world that is in flux (Brown, 2012: 455). While IR constructivisms turn to practice initially meant to perpetuate rather than end the ‘division of labour’ between explanatory and normative theorising, we are currently witnessing an uptick in recovering the normative dimension of international practices—a phenomenon I have figuratively described as ‘the postman always rings twice’. For the first time since Price’s call on constructivism to devise normative benchmarks to evaluate international practices, IR practice scholars and normative theorists are straddling their intra-disciplinary boundary to research the relationship between norms and practices as well as the moral judgement implicated in practices. In this chapter, I have specifically focused on three promising accounts that demonstrate how the normative force of practical judgement can be harnessed as an evaluative standard without resorting to abstract rules or ready-made principles of action akin to the Kantian moral law: I outlined Brown’s account as grounded in Aristotle’s virtue of phronesis, Frost and Lechner’s account that is indebted to Wittgenstein’s rule-following and Ralph’s account that draws on Dewey’s pragmatism. All three are based on the premise that engaging the ‘is’ together with the ‘ought’ is a sine qua non for enquiries into international practices.

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Notes 1. The term ‘International Practice Theory’ goes back to Bueger and Gadinger (2018) who advanced it as an umbrella term for practice-based approaches in the IR discipline. When coining the term and its acronym, they were aware that this might cause controversy and confusion with International Political Theory’s already existing acronym. Back then, however, they did not find it problematic, possibly because they regarded IR practice and normative theory as two separate ‘intellectual fields’ that do not have much overlap (ibid.: 12, endnote 1). 2. For an alternative approach that bridges the divide between practice approaches and normative theory see Adler’s (2019) most recent monograph World Ordering. He develops the approach of ‘humanist realism’ as a normative middle-ground and suggests that the ethical value of a common humanity should be strived for when aiming at better practices (Adler, 2019: 5). In his view, humanist realism is a sufficiently ‘bounded’ and ‘partial’ ethical ideal that avoids imposing new forms of universal domination and violence in global politics. 3. In the literal sense of the term, agora was a central public square in Ancient Greece. However, I here follow Wiener et al. (2019) who use the term more figuratively to denote a site and space for intellectual exchange.

References Adler, E. (2019). World ordering: A social theory of cognitive evolution. Cambridge University Press. Adler, E., & Pouliot, V. (2011a). International practices. In E. Adler & V. Pouliot (Eds.), International Practices (pp. 3–35). Cambridge University Press. Adler, E., & Pouliot, V. (2011b). International practices. International Theory, 3(1), 1–36. Adler-Nissen, R., & Pouliot, V. (2014). Power in practice: Negotiating the international intervention in Libya. European Journal of International Relations, 20(4), 889–911. Bargués, P. (2020). Peacebuilding without peace? On how pragmatism complicates the practice of international intervention. Review of International Studies, 46(2), 237–255. Bloor, D. (2001). Wittgenstein and the priority of practice. In T. R. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina, & E. v. Savigny (Eds.), The practice turn in contemporary theory (pp. 103–114). Routledge.

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Pratt, S. F. (2020). From norms to normative configurations: A pragmatist and relational approach to theorizing normativity in IR. International Theory, 12(1), 59–82. Price, R. M. (Ed.). (2008). Moral limit and possibility in world politics. Cambridge University Press. Puetter, U., & Wiener, A. (2009). The quality of norms is what actors make of It: Critical constructivist research on norms. Journal of International Law and International Relations, 5, 1–16. Ralph, J. (2018). What should be done? Pragmatic constructivist ethics and the responsibility to protect. International Organization, 72(1), 173–203. Ralph, J., & Gifkins, J. (2017). The purpose of United Nations Security Council practice: Contesting competence claims in the normative context created by the responsibility to protect. European Journal of International Relations, 23(3), 630–653. Reus-Smit, C. (2008). Constructivism and the structure of ethical reasoning. In R. M. Price (Ed.), Moral limit and possibility in world politics (pp. 53–82). Cambridge University Press. Risse, T. (2000). “Let’s Argue!”: Communicative action in world politics. International Organization, 54(1), 1–39. Rouse, J. (2007). Social practices and normativity. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 37 (1), 46–56. Schatzki, T. R. (2001). Practice mind-ed orders. In T. R. Schatzki, K. KnorrCetina, & E. v. Savigny (Eds.), The practice turn in contemporary theory (pp. 50–63). Routledge. Schatzki, T. R. (2002). The site of the social: A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. Pennsylvania State University Press. Schatzki, T. R., Knorr-Cetina, K., & Savigny, E. v. (Eds.). (2001). The practice turn in contemporary theory. Routledge. Schindler, S., & Wille, T. (2019). How can we criticize international practices? International Studies Quarterly, 63(4), 1014–1024. Sundaram, S. S. & Thakur, V. (2019). A pragmatic methodology for studying international practices. Journal of International Political Theory [Online] Available from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/ 1755088219879177. Accessed 25 Mar 2021. Wiener, A. (2004). Contested compliance: Interventions on the normative structure of world politics. European Journal of International Relations, 10(2), 189–234. Wiener, A. (2007a). Contested meanings of norms: A research framework. Comparative European Politics, 5(1), 1–17. Wiener, A. (2007b). The dual quality of norms and governance beyond the state: Sociological and normative approaches to ‘interaction.’ Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 10(1), 47–69.

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CHAPTER 7

Justice and Injustice in International Political Theory Regina Kreide

Abstract This chapter aims to reconstruct the various stages of a European-based International Political Theory with a special attention to concepts of justice, a key concept of political theory and philosophy. The chapter presents the prevailing liberal notions of justice of an international political theory, before a conception of political injustice that avoids some of the problems mentioned is presented with due brevity (part I). A second part (II) will be concerned with reconstructing a theory of “political injustice” that offers the possibility of circumventing the abovementioned problems. A theory of injustice that lives up to the claim of being an international political theory has at least three aspects: it is (a) action-related, (b) focuses on structural injustice at the same time, and also addresses the question of who actually determines what counts as injustice. This is (c) the task of political injustice. Finally, (d) this approach is defended against some important objections.

R. Kreide (B) Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Paipais (ed.), Perspectives on International Political Theory in Europe, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77274-1_7

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Keywords Injustice · Practice approach · Oppression · Political injustice · Beyond statism and cosmopolitanism

This chapter aims to reconstruct the various stages of a European-based International Political Theory with a special attention to concepts of justice, a key concept of political theory and philosophy. A few words in advance about the objective of the volume and the task of this contribution in particular are worth mentioning. The goal of discussing approaches to justice within the framework of an international political theory in such a way that their European tradition becomes visible, as announced in the book series, might seem to be a contradiction in terms. This is because international political theory has understood itself precisely as a transnationalisation of political theory—not least in order to analyse global problems from the very outset not only from a national or regional perspective, but consistently from a transnational perspective. At the same time, in view of the globalising sciences, it seems strange, if not ideological, to want to identify a part of international political theory formation as genuinely European. For sure, we are still a long way from a global scholarly context; just think of the fact that there are still far fewer African or Latin American journals that are really noticed in the Global North. But the discourses in the Global North have nevertheless converged to such an extent that it seems hard even to be able to identify European approaches. I therefore understand the task set here in such a way that it can— at best—be about something akin to the historical roots of a certain theoretical tradition. One thinks—and this will play a role in my contribution—of the older Frankfurt School. But how difficult—because of being blurred—this is, even where it becomes apparent as soon as one looks a little closer. And, in focusing on the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in particular, it is the case that most of its members had to live in exile for a long time, mostly in the United States, and even here, even in the first generation of Critical Theory, one can no longer clearly say that its work truly has a European identity. Perhaps fascist political theories still have the clearest claim to European origins. But that is guaranteed not to be the focus of the book series. Meanwhile, as a final note, the

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distinction between “continental philosophy” and “Anglo-Saxon philosophy” has also become obsolete in philosophy, finding its expression, at most, as an analytical, rather than a real, distinction. I would like then to make the suggestion to understand European here, despite all the difficulties, in such a way that, as already mentioned, its “roots of origin” are to be found. And at the same time, I would like to claim that European is connected with a colonial and postcolonial claim to dominance (Bhambra & Narayan, 2017, among others). This chapter aims to reflect on the ambivalent talk of a European international political theory in so far as different aspects of oppression are explicitly assumed here. Conceptually, according to the main thesis, it is more plausible to analyse questions of justice from their negative side, the experience of injustice in contexts of power relations, than to assume a priori a positive justification of justice. As we will also see in the discussion of approaches to justice, implicit claims to power are “built in”, at least to some approaches. Not all approaches to justice have a self-reflexive side that deals critically with the claim of justice as “being right”. Regardless of this, there have been some important changes in the field of theories of justice. The revision of notions of justice reflected in political theory began in specific processes of globalisation and has been profitably developed over the last 20 years. Global problems, such as the continuing worldwide poverty, migration, the harmful consequences of climate change, and increased pandemics, have all contributed to the fact that some philosophical and political-theoretical concepts, such as equality, and freedom, but also justice, are no longer addressed solely as a nation-state, but also as a worldwide, problem. A “methodological nationalism” (Beck & Grande, 2010) has given way, in some areas of political philosophy and political theory, to a “methodological cosmopolitanism” or “methodological transnationalism”, in which, for example, questions of justice are no longer analysed and evaluated from the outset from the perspective of state-organised political communities (of citizens), but from the perspective of individuals (or world citizens), regardless of their state affiliation. This has also had implications for the discussion on justice and its reflection in political theory. Over the last years, the debate in the context of an International Political Theory and philosophy of global justice has moved beyond the divide between the statist and the cosmopolitan, as well as the ideal and non-ideal approaches. Rather, a turn to empirical realities has taken

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place both in the European debate and beyond, claiming that normative political philosophy and theory need to address empirical facts about global poverty, wealth, climate change, and pandemics. The approaches that deal with a critically reflected relationship between normative theory and empiricism are manifold, but not equally convincing. This chapter presents the prevailing liberal notions of justice of an international political theory, before a conception of political injustice that avoids some of the problems mentioned are presented with due brevity. Justice from a liberal perspective (I), for all its diversity, has at least four shared characteristics that appear problematical for different reasons. Accordingly, they are (a) idealistic, (b) non-relational, (c) focused on the distribution of goods, and (d) formulate a positive, justification-oriented normative theory. Each of the steps (a)–(d) is subjected to a fundamental critique of the dominant liberal models of justice from an international political theory perspective. A second part (II) will be concerned with reconstructing a theory of “political injustice” that offers the possibility of circumventing the above-mentioned problems. A theory of injustice that lives up to the claim of being an international political theory has at least three aspects: it is (a) action-related, (b) focuses on structural injustice at the same time, and also addresses the question of who actually determines what counts as injustice. This is (c) the task of political injustice. Finally, (d) this approach is defended against some important objections. Let me first sketch the characteristic features of liberal theories of justice.

Liberal Theories of Justice Liberal theories of justice are based upon rational ideas that describe a just state of affairs or on principles that lead to just institutions, if they are valid. They are idealistic in that they possess a normative “surplus” that allows them to transcend concrete political and social conditions (Caney, 2005; Moellendorf, 2002; Gosepath, 2004). It is undoubtedly a merit of liberal theories of justice that they make us aware of what realist, mostly political science, theories systematically suppress, namely, the seminal role of ideas in the evolution of societies. One thinks of Olympe de Gouges and her fight for women’s rights during the French Revolution, which she paid for with her life, or of the French labour leader Auguste Blanqui, who stated in court that his profession, like that of millions of Frenchmen, was proletarian (Rancière, 2002: 49).

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Idealist Theories Despite this turn to ideals, principles, and visions, or precisely because of them, liberal principles of justice have been criticised, especially from a radical democratic perspective. A first point of criticism concerns the lack of reference to the real-existing world with its conflicts and power relations. Starting from a moral standpoint, liberal theories construct universalistic normative principles, for example, global principles of distribution or exchange, which are then “applied” to political reality in a second step. A major problem with this methodological approach is that the systemic complexity of social relations, from international law to the global economy, to interest-led resistance in political struggles, can only be addressed as marginal phenomena of political action (Brunkhorst, 2010). Since the notion of reason used by idealist theories is legitimated by the “right” notion of justice, it cannot be shaken by something such as “unfriendly” material and political conditions. A second problem is that theory is inconceivable without reference to practice. It was largely to the credit of Karl Marx and Max Horkheimer that transcendental philosophy was overcome. While, for Hegel, theoretical reflection still finds its conclusion in the absolute knowledge of philosophy, Marx turns to the real “material” processes. The theory, as Horkheimer then points out, must describe itself as a part of the context of life that it attempts to grasp (Horkheimer, 1972/1937: 245–294). Thus, from the outset, theory reflects its own conditions and understands itself as part of the practice that it describes. Consequently, phenomena that point to justice, or, more importantly, to injustice, such as exploitation, alienation, and exclusion, cannot be overcome in theory, but only in practice (Habermas, 1987/1968: 14, 84). In other words, a theory of justice can only be understood as a science of practice. Often, it is especially the radical theories of democracy that emphasise this relation to practice particularly strongly. Jacques Rancière, for example, understands his entire project as an attempt to “think the return of ‘political philosophy’ into the field of practice” (Rancière, 2002: 13). Liberal theories of justice, however, not only miss the connection to social reality, but also miss the dialectical point (Brunkhorst, 2010). The dualistic character of morality—being torn between freedom and duty— is only half-resolved: “idealists” emphasise the freedom that normative ideals can hold and often invoke justice and human rights, but they

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disregard the not-so-freedom-giving, patronising side of ideal ideas. But even the idea of justice, as we know, can be misused for oppressive interventions, imperialist geopolitics, and even to justify neocolonial policies pursued in the name of justice (Kreide, 2015: 10–25). In these scenarios, it is the task of democracy to legitimise notions of justice that are supposed to shape the basic structure of society in an “application step” through public use of reason (Rawls, 1993: 333–363). Otherwise, democracy is placed at the mere service of development work as the best possible condition for the prevention of poverty (Pogge, 2008: 152–173). In both cases, this notion of justice misinterprets even the notion of democracy and politics and becomes a kind of “applied ethics”, as Raymond Geuss puts it, which fails to recognise the prevailing social conditions (Geuss, 2008: 18).

Non-relational Theories A second feature of liberal theories of justice is that these theories are non-relational. The distinction between relational and non-relational justice (Armstrong, 2012; Sangiovanni, 2008: 4–39) classifies theories of justice according to the extent to which the claims of justice that they make are based upon a shared institutional or interactive context, or claim to be able to exist independently of context. Non-relational positions assume that people possess claims simply as human beings. Thus, our humanity and dignity already have equal claims to be treated justly. Relational approaches, on the other hand, assume that justice is relevant to relationships in which people stand in a certain relation to each other and share a personal or institutional context (Ronzoni, 2009; Valentini, 2011). Accordingly, justice is contextual and related to pre-existing structures and interactions. Although it is undoubtedly not always possible to classify all theories of justice clearly into one or the other theoretical camp, it can be said that liberal theories of justice tend to lean towards a non-relational basic assumption. A far-reaching criticism of non-relational theories of justice, which is also instructive for the discourse of radical democracy, comes from the liberal side itself, for example, from Thomas Pogge, who, following John Rawls, makes a decisive change of perspective, especially with regard to global justice. Instead of justifying universalistic principles of justice for the interaction between individuals, he starts from the institutional dimension of justice. This focuses attention on the causal analysis

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of both national and international contexts of financial, economic, and legal systems, and their influences on the development of poverty, wealth, and injustice (Pogge, 2008). Pogge is in the liberal Rawlsian tradition, but while Rawls assumes, with respect to transnational inequalities, that the great evil for poor countries is often local culture and corrupt élites and governments (Rawls, 1999: 89), Pogge analyses the impact of international agreements on people’s lives—an aspect not seen by non-relational justice theory. In this respect, Pogge includes the context of justice in his investigations. However, he is mainly interested in the negative consequences of an unsuccessful implementation of justice principles, not in how they come about, nor in the perspective on the affected subjects and their experiences of injustice. Even democracy, which does not come into view at all in non-relational theories, plays a subordinate role in these institutional approaches. For Rawls, as for Pogge, democracy is in the service of justice and is philosophically and politically subordinate to it. For both authors, a crucial step in promoting (global) justice is that the goal of any material and technological assistance should be to install just and democratic institutions. Educational programmes could contribute to this, as could birth control measures (Rawls, 1999).

Distributive Justice A third feature of liberal justice theory is that it is predominantly understood as distributive justice: Representatives of contemporary “distributive justice” challenge the previous assumption that the unequal distribution of goods (gross national product, natural resources, educational opportunities, health care, and environmental burdens) is taken for granted. As one of the first to propose, for example, a model of global redistribution, Charles Beitz, following John Rawls’ theory of justice, develops a global difference principle that is the yardstick for a basic transnational structure and provides information about when inequalities are permitted (Beitz, 2009). Going one step further than Beitz, Darrell Moellendorf proposes an ideal of global egalitarianism (Moellendorf, 2002). For Moellendorf, substantive egalitarianism expresses itself in fair equality of opportunity with global reach (Moellendorf, 2002: 42). A fundamental critique of conceptions of distributive justice—of whatever variety—comes from Iris Marion Young, among others. A focus on unequal distribution, she argues, prevents other forms of degradation,

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exclusion, and oppression from coming into view (Young, 1990). Above all, the structural causes of the global relations of exploitation, dependency, and exclusion would not be addressed if attention were focused solely on the unjust or just distribution of goods, benefits, and burdens. Unjust relations will not be abolished if the focus is only on “which goods are to be distributed to whom and by whom, and to what extent, for what reasons” (Forst, 2011: 29–116). This is where the question of power enters the stage. What is decisive, after all, is how these goods come into the world in the first place, who determines their distribution, and how this is then done (Forst, 2015: 37–81). These are genuine questions of power that must be taken into account when determining justice.

A Positive Theory Finally, liberal theories of justice arrive at the construction and justification of principles of justice in one rational way or another. They formulate a “positive” theory that designs a desirable normative state upon the basis of justified principles—even if hardly any author intends to sketch a naïve blueprint of a just society. The focus on positive normative theorising is accompanied by an unnecessary limitation that does not do justice to the demands of social reality. Justice theory thus closes its mind to the question of who is included in a political process and who is excluded; what mechanisms lead to social exclusion; what obstacles, what motivational, what structural, blockades stand in the way of equal political participation. Certainly, one could object that an analysis of social conditions does not yet provide information about the normative correctness of principles underlying a well-founded conception of democracy. After all, according to the classic “is/ought” problem, how should one move from empirical conditions to normative justifications?

The Turn to Injustice in International Political Theory Most theories of justice mention injustice marginally, if at all—and then, simply as the antonym of the real item of interest. The standard account is that injustice prevails when no just political order exists, that is, when justice is absent. This perspective is too one-sided. Injustice, often enough, shows itself where it is supposedly just or exists alongside just institutions. However, it is also necessary to uncover new injustices, as

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injustice also occurs, for example, when human rights are violated, and when injustice of a hitherto unknown nature occurs: for example, when housing is marketed in such a way that it becomes unaffordable. Or when the ecological basis of life disappears. Even if injustice proves fairly epiphenomenal in the history of the idea of justice, some theories engage more systematically with the issue (Shklar, 1992). For Plato (2020), the model of distributive justice demonstrates no interest in how one can change people who act unjustly (as they so often do), but instead reinforces their misplaced energy and aggression, in as much as all that matters is whether rules are observed or not: courts simply encourage the greedy to accuse those greedier still in order to receive more.1 In De civitate Dei (1997), Augustine discusses injustice as an expression of the finite cognitive abilities of human beings. Neither the Christian prince nor (to be sure) the pagan chieftain possesses sufficient knowledge to pay God his due and lead humankind on the right path, in keeping with divine will. Even with the loftiest intentions, one’s political actions never attain one’s moral aims, as it is impossible to know moral necessities fully. Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French thinker, offers a more psychological approach in which he doubts that we can ever know enough to create a just society. With a view to the law, one usually commits wrongs while seeking to remain within legal boundaries. In fact, human life is so subjective and varied that it is impossible to find shared rules that do justice to all subjective experiences (de Montaigne, 1998: 439–527). All three authors share the doubt that we can ever know enough about what is just. It is not surprising that all three of them, as the children of times marked by wars, high criminality, and epidemics, ask: “Why do we do this to ourselves and others?” and “What can we really know about our times, about justice, in a world where everything is so uncertain?” In this light, simply calling for equitable distribution in order to ensure justice seems both simplistic and naïve. Thus, it seems to be helpful to turn to a completely different point of view, and, at the same time, to reflect upon the existing social conditions from the beginning. In Faces of Injustice—a book which was first published in 1990 and has since come to count as a classic in the field— the American philosopher Judith Shklar approaches the topic also in a negativistic manner, that is, by questioning the world in which we are living. Her approach is characterised by two aspects in particular, which have been taken up by other authors over the last few years. I will use

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these two aspects here as a starting point for further analysis, namely, action-related and structural injustice. However, we will see in the course of the discussion that this distinction is not quite sufficient and that we also need to think about political injustice.

Action-Related Injustice First of all, the subject also plays a decisive role here (Shklar, 1992: 16). Without access to the perspective of victims, Shklar maintains, outsiders–philosophers, for instance—cannot know the truth about injustice. (Shklar, 1992, 17) This is the case because the experience of being wronged is much more “intense” than what the principles of justice, which are administratively mediated, recognise, or allow for. We spontaneously see economic deprivation, exposure to public mockery, or being treated with utter indifference, as unjust. No theoretical subtlety is required. Our “sense of injustice” is roused by pain. Second, a change of perspective brings to light what many theories of justice omit: the many and varied conditions which, while barely perceptible outwardly, prove unbearable for those affected, to which many individuals contribute—even without meaning to do so—and without recognising the scope or consequences of their actions. What Shklar has in mind here are the occurrences common to everyday life when we do not make ourselves guilty of wrongdoing, but also fail to intervene; examples include witnessing verbal or physical violence while standing idly by, or when we do nothing to avert obvious wrongs such as refugees drowning in the Mediterranean (Shklar, 1990: 42). Passive injustice, as Shklar calls it, is what hurts most: someone is wronged, but nobody cares. I call this the action-related injustice approach, as it proceeds in a negativistic manner and incorporates the subject’s inner perspective—in contrast to the structural-injustice approach, about which I will speak in a moment. Action-related injustice concerns the interactional obstacles in everyday situations: condescending or degrading behaviour, and unjustified ascriptions or representations. Examples occur when the credibility of statements is doubted, or when the recognition of social experience in professional and day-to-day life is questioned (Fricker, 2007). The British philosopher Miranda Fricker distinguishes between testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice.

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Testimonial injustice means that a person suffers from an “identityprejudicial credibility deficit” (Fricker, 2007: 28). Injustice of this kind harms the victim in several ways. For one, this person is denied the capacity to know things with certainty. When a female member of parliament is told how “remarkably competent” she is, or when a fellow politician calls out during a debate, “It’s so cute when you get mad and your earrings shake”, these are ways of denigrating someone seen as an intruder and social climber (Friedrichs, 2018; Wittig et al. 2013). Or when jobseekers and families from Eastern Europe, often Roma, who have rented, on three-month contracts and at inflated prices, otherwise abandoned apartments, are not taken seriously if they complain. Social minorities or people with a lower-class background often do not dare and do not even know that they are eligible to do so. This is evidence that, when someone is assigned a low level in the social hierarchy, this makes the person in question eventually doubt his or her abilities. Instances include being publicly represented in a manner that does not correspond to one’s own self-image—say, being described as poor and therefore unable to handle money (welfare recipients)—when pejorative stereotypes predominate (e.g. a certain social group is accused of stealing), or when one does not even consider the idea of asserting one’s legal rights in the first place (to housing, for instance) because of factors such as age, social class, and education (Kreide, 2019). These forms of denying recognition amount to a total disregard for the “lived experience” of the parties affected (Fricker, 2007: 71).

Structural Injustice But does the action-related view of injustice provide the full picture? Considering inner, subjective experience alone does not go far enough, for at least two reasons. For one, there is the question of when we can say that we have experienced injustice, and when it is a matter of misfortune. In the first case, that of injustice, it is generally agreed that balance should be restored (as we noted at the outset). Bad luck, however, refers to conditions that depend on chance, for which no one can be held responsible (Shklar, 1992: 18). But even if the distinction is easy enough in theoretical terms, empirical cases often present blurred lines. Thus, the loss of a house in a natural disaster may strike us as a matter of misfortune at first. However, a closer look may reveal that decades of environmental destruction have eroded the hillside upon which it was built, that the

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dwellings of the poor, made with simple construction materials, cannot withstand a hurricane or earthquake, that municipal authorities neglected maintenance work and security measures, and so on. We must take a context perspective into account, that is, analyse the social, economic, and political conditions in order to see what the causes of the alleged misfortune actually are. The second question concerns the fact that the distinction between injustice and accident is also never “simply given”, from a psychological point of view. We are fooling ourselves if we think that matters are clearly defined, self-evident, and need only to be pointed out. By the same token, it is not always possible to draw a line separating injustice as it is experienced and injustice as it is remembered (or imagined). Victims sometimes describe being wronged as misfortune (not as injustice); and they may even identify with the perpetrator (Shklar, 1990: 91ff.)—or contemplate revenge, which stands to produce further wrongs. Psychological defence mechanisms play an important role in the ways in which injustice is assessed. Here, too, an outside perspective is necessary in order to determine the extent to which our judgement has been shaped by social, political, and historical circumstances. For now, it nevertheless makes sense to look “behind” actions and modes of behaviour, and to examine the structures of power that condition what we do. According to Iris Marion Young, acts of injustice are inseparably tied to oppressive and exploitative relations, political marginalisation, and cultural discrimination (Young, 1990: 15–38). Hereby, a binary division does not hold for oppressors, on the one hand, and the oppressed, on the other; instead, members of certain groups face structural disadvantages. As Sally Haslanger has recently put it, oppression is something “done” both by agents as we just saw, but also by structures— albeit in different ways. Agents cause unwarranted suffering by misusing power (say, casting someone in a bad light), whereas structures cause injustice by producing wrongful concentrations of power (Haslanger, 2012: 311). A given social structure may be understood as a system of (formal and informal) rules that are responsible for the power relations between the various social actors who observe them. It qualifies as unjust when the rules systematically place some social groups at a disadvantage relative to others—say, when it comes to leadership positions, or access to goods and opportunities (education, healthcare, the job market, housing, etc.). Research confirms that, across the globe, the wealth of the top one per

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cent is staying in the same hands (that is, 80 people on the whole planet have the material means equal to what half of the world’s population— 3.5 billion people—possess), the middle classes in northern countries are shrinking, and the opportunities for social ascent through education are decreasing (Milanovic, 2016). Another example of structural injustice is housing. First, one can say that the commodity nature of dwellings themselves is unjust. One of the problems of the current process of marketing housing is obviously the well-established problem that the wealthy, in particular, can afford the most sought-after residential locations, while the poorer ones live with rising rents and can only afford a home of their own if they become heavily indebted. Moreover, the unbridled marketing of housing is opposed by the claim that adequate housing is a human right. This means that people have a right to adequate, affordable housing, with the necessary infrastructure in the home (such as drinking water and sanitation) as well as outside the home (such as shopping and recreation facilities, public transport, etc.).2 Adequate housing does not necessarily contradict the idea of home ownership, but it does contradict the commodification of housing in order to make the greatest possible profit. Profit maximisation and housing for the lower and middle classes are in tension with each other.3 And thirdly, one can clearly see that we are not only dealing with individual “greedy” landlords, who, of course, also exist. Rather, it is large, globally operating corporations that systematically purchase apartments on a large scale. They “scan” cities for “undervalued living space”, i.e. living space in which tenants can still live at acceptable rents, buy these houses, renovate them, and then rent them out much more expensively. But it is even more lucrative to leave the apartments, which the tenants have had to vacate because they could no longer afford to pay the rent, empty, in order to be able to sell them more expensively at some point in the future (see Butler, 2017). One example of this can be found in London: Here 80 per cent of the apartments bought by corporations are empty. Whole streets and quarters deserted. Many of these homes are owned by Blackstone, a globally active company, the largest landlord in the world. 20,000 former social-housing units have just been purchased by Blackstone in Copenhagen (see Cumming, 2015). Fourthly, structural injustice is reflected in the lack of transparency of transnational rule systems. For example, property owners are not easy to determine. Documents may lead to shell corporations in Germany, Luxembourg,

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or Cyprus, for example. Such detective work may prove especially difficult because, in the case of Germany, it does not require the owners to submit information to the land registry. A post-office box is all it takes for the backers to remain anonymous.4 Kai Bussmann of the “Economy and Crime Research Center” at Halle-Wittenberg has spoken of German (and EU) complicity in money laundering. He justifies this quite harsh reproach with the fact that the federal government and even the EU have opposed changes to European law that would set up a central property registry (Bussmann, 2018). One can see how standing international regulations are leading to conditions of unjustified domination. The social groups affected by an unjust rule system or by the lack of any just rules at all are subject to standing rules all the same, but they clearly wield less political power. In order to qualify as structural injustice, and not as the consequence of unfair or unequal distribution, an enduring and deep-seated imbalance of power between social groups must prevail. This leads me to a third aspect of injustice.

Political Injustice A sense of injustice is sparked by the experience of being wronged as well as by the experience of being dominated by structures that lead to exclusion and discrimination. As it mounts, it makes its way into the political sphere. Political injustice manifests itself, on the one hand, in not having the power to decide upon how to distribute resources in the world, and, more importantly, in not having the power to decide upon one’s own matters under what conditions they are produced in the first place. This is linked to the experience of not being in a power position to rebel against humiliating attributions and dominant structures. On the other hand, and on a different level, it shows when one is unable to participate in processes or when one is excluded from the processes in which it is determined what counts as injustice at all. It starts from the experience of not having been asked about one’s situation, about one’s opinion, and about how best to participate in the political processes of the justification of one’s opinion. For this reason, democracy—which allows citizens to proceed publicly against unjust events and conditions—is vital: no one should be prevented from making the degradation or humiliation that he or she has experienced into an issue. Being deemed untrustworthy or ignorant upon

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the basis of stereotypes is reflected in the political injustice of not being heard (Fricker, 2007). Secondly, injustice is political in the sense that it might start with a concrete, local experience of degradation or oppression, and tends to be parochial. However, political injustice valorises the generalising power of negation. Instead of starting out from the legitimation of principles of justice, it begins with a sense of injustice that comes to light in the experience of exploited and oppressed people. Think about some historical approaches. Kant enlists the reflexive dynamic of negation when he speaks of the violation of rights that can be felt in every place on earth by everyone, and Jean Piaget identifies the role of experiencing wrongs for the development of a sense of justice. Negative feelings are sensitive to new, not yet legalised and thematised forms of wrongs, such as the destruction of nature or the speculation with housing. They are intensive, direct, and immediate. Negation implies universalism, without which theoretical knowledge about society would be impossible. As Barrington Moore points out, when exploited workers or suppressed people reject suffering and oppression, they proclaim something like “I can’t stand it any longer” or “workers of the world, unite!” As Adorno and Habermas observe, negative feelings have a cognitive content that derives from their intersubjectivity. Those who are enraged at the exploitation to which they are subject(ed) have a reason for their moral indignation, which can be shared with others. This is why the sense of humiliation experienced by slaves is not merely resentment, resentment understood as an unconscious aversion based upon prejudices, a feeling of inferiority, envy, an unreflected powerlessness. Rather, it expresses an experience of oppression that is first experienced as an insult, a degradation, or a humiliation, but which then they have to pass through a test of generalisability at a further stage of reflection. Can I justify this experience to others? Can it be shared by others? This reflection expresses itself in a sub-subjective process and can ultimately only be answered in political practice. All three perspectives, the action-oriented, the structural, and the political injustice interlock and refer to each other: the first questions practices of discrimination that happen intersubjectively, the second analyses institutional obstacles which either allow, or fail to prevent, discrimination and exclusion, and discrimination and humiliation, and the third focuses on power relations, the obstacles of political self-determination, and the exclusion from political membership. In order to clarify this aspect

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further, I would like to discuss some central possible objections in the following.

In Defence of the Turn to Injustice One could object at this point that the previous remarks continue to be based upon the principles of distributive justice. Isn’t this example about the power to gain access to coveted resources? It seems to me that this is not the case, because power is also relational and not distributable. At the forefront of structural injustice is power asymmetry or the powerlessness to be dominated by rules that block opportunities and influence. The “added value” of the concept of injustice lies in being able to uncover how a certain ignorance, on the part of profiteers, about “cheap labour”, on the one hand—with international rules allowing these working conditions—meets the desperation of jobseekers, on the other. Second, however, you may ask yourself whether, by turning away from distributive justice, all notion of equality is also abandoned. This is not the case, either. It makes sense to distinguish two levels on which equality plays a role. One level deals with the distribution of goods and their justified (or unjustified) exceptions. On a more fundamental level, equality for a human being is central. It needs no further explanation. Here, equality and inequality are not related to each other in an inter-relationship (Buchanan, 2013). Equality for a person who deserves respect is not (any longer) questioned at this normative level. That this is the case can be seen from the fact that we do not have to justify publicly that there are differences in value between people. Historical examples of such value differences include, for example, the supposed right of the first-born male child, which he proclaims to have over all his siblings, or discrimination in such a way that whites are worth more than people of a different skin colour or men more than women. Such reasoning strategies have, of course, existed both in morality and in the natural sciences, although to represent them in this obvious and public manner seems no longer possible (Tugendhat, 1983: 375). This does not mean, however, that there is no discrimination in practice, but it does not usually deny that human beings are equal. Third, one may ask whether injustice still needs justice. Action-related, structural and political injustice, as presented here, stand for themselves, and are not linked to a specific, previously established notion of justice. In order to identify injustice, one needs—maybe—a sense of justice, albeit

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not a fully fledged conception of justice. This sense of justice may be vague and not yet fully developed. And we do not need to pretend that we do not live in a world in which we find intuitive or even existent institutionalised notions of justice. None of the existing ideas of justice mean, however, that, when we deal with injustice, we always know precisely what an experience of injustice means, and whether it is related to a particular notion of justice. Our sense of injustice alerts us to cases that we perceive as degrading, oppressive, or exploitative. It is an indicator of something being wrong. These forms of domination, discrimination, and exclusion can be described in theoretical terms (as I have tried to do, in part). But their ultimate plausibility is only apparent in political practice. This means that one might be sensitive towards other forms of injustice, which are the result of experienced injustice, even if it is not yet fully described. One example of this is injustice towards nature. Or, with regard to housing, interactional injustice, for example, when certain populations have difficulty obtaining housing because of their “foreign” sounding name or their race. Or, in the same area, when transparency rules are not respected when buying and selling an apartment and we are then dealing with structural injustice. And fourth, we speak of political injustice when preventing selfdetermined housing (maybe in co-operatives) and exclusion from political self-determination on housing politics is at stake. Identifications of injustice usually take place locally, on the spot. But, as we have seen in the example of housing speculation, one quickly reaches a point where not only local and regional, but also transnational, structural power relations are revealed. In this respect, too, the turn to injustice is a genuine theme of international political theory. Experiences of and reflections on injustice can only be analysed from a global standpoint.

Conclusion In summary, it can be said that a theory of injustice should satisfy at least three requirements. First, it diagnoses experience-based and action-related injustices, which, secondly, it reinscribes within a framework of structural injustices that occur locally, but can also have a global dimension. Third, it reveals the normative conditions for the generation of norms, rules, and rights that point to political power asymmetries, political marginalisation, processes of silence and public degradation, and ultimately stand in the way of political participation. Combining local and global experience

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and being open to new experiences is an important building block for an international political theory. The negative approach, which makes it possible to uncover injustices, shows the obstacles that stand in the way of the formation of a just world society. The practice-based conception is, at the same time, necessary for the social analysis of the obstacles, in order to analyse potentials for legitimising just institutions. For example, the current commodification of housing impedes the exercise of a practice-based conception of justice. Normative standards, and standards of justice in particular, are, as the discussion about theories of injustice also shows, only a temporary phenomenon. They can quickly be ploughed under by the onset of the cruelty that slumbers under a thin blanket of civilisation. It is important to see these wrongs—not to walk around them or away from them, but to put up warning signs and to understand how they can arise. This is the task of injustice and an international political theory. Finally, to return to our initial considerations, it should have become clear that two fall lines have been overcome. First, the previously common distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory has been replaced by an approach that bridges the two poles, jumping from the analysis of experiences of injustice in the very real world to normative reflection and back again. In this way, an empirically saturated normative reflection is achieved. And secondly, this methodological, practice-oriented approach also makes the commitment to a European International Political Theory obsolete. In analysing the housing problem, we have seen that local injustices can have transnational structural causes. Therefore, limiting the analysis to a European context would seem to be misleading. This, of course, does not exclude the possibility that specific problems (European migration law, for instance) have an actual European character and are also concerned with injustice. The advantage of international political theory, however, lies precisely in its ability to transcend existing ascriptive conceptual definitions. This chapter tries to contribute to freeing political theory from fixed nation-state or European constrictions as well as from a liberal fixation on justification.

Notes 1. “[A] bigger piece of cake” (see Shklar, 1990: 22).

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2. See UN-Habitat commentary of 2009/2014, The Right to Adequate Housing, 2009/2014. 3. The human right to housing has already been recognised as a right by the United Nations and commented upon accordingly. If the human right to housing is already enshrined as a right, even if it is not yet fully enforced as a practice, it nevertheless binds the various actors and requires them to accept and work for its better enforcement. 4. “How the Real Estate Business is Internationally Caught up in Organised Crime”, research on building in Berlin conducted by “Netzwerk Steuergerechtigkeit”, with the assistance of Christoph Trautvetter.

References Armstrong, C. (2012). Global distributive justice. Cambridge University Press. Bhambra, G., & Narayan, J. (Eds.). (2017). European cosmopolitanism: Colonial histories and postcolonial societies. Routledge. Beck, U., & Grande, E. (2010). Jenseits des methodologischen Nationalismus: Außereuropäische und europäische Variationen der Zweiten Moderne. In Soziale Welt, 61(3/4), 187–216. Beitz, C. (2009). The idea of human rights. Oxford University Press. Brunkhorst, H. (2010). Neustart: Kritische Theorie Internationaler Beziehungen. In Zeitschrift für Internationale Politik, 17(2), 293–315. Buchanan, A. (2013). The heart of human rights. Oxford University Press. Bussmann, K. (2018). Geldwäscheprävention im Markt. Funktionen, Chancen und Defizite. Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland. Butler, P. (2017, Nov 8). One in every 200 people in UK are homeless, according to Shelter. The Guardian. Retrieved from 15 October 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/08/one-in-every200-people-in-uk-are-homeless-according-to-shelter. Caney, S. (2005). Justice beyond borders: A global political theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cumming, E. (2015, Jan 25). It’s like a ghost town: Lights go out as foreign owners desert London homes. The Guardian. Retrieved from 15 October 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/25/itslike-a-ghost-town-lights-go-out-as-foreign-ownersdesert-london-homes. de Montaigne, M. (1580/1998). Essays (J. M. Cohen, Trans.). Penguin. Forst, R. (2011). Die Ungerechtigkeit der Gerechtigkeit. Normative Dialektik nach Ibsen, Cavell und Adorno. In R. Forst, Kritik der Rechtfertigungsverhältnisse. Perspektiven einer kritischen Theorie der Politik (pp. 181–195). Suhrkamp.

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Valentini, L. (2011). Justice in a globalized world: A normative framework. Oxford University Press. Wittig, M., Jensen, K., & Tomasello, M. (2013). Five-year-olds understand fair as equal in a mini-ultimatum game. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 115(2), 324–337. World Trade Organization (WTO). (2018). World trade statistical review. Available at: https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/wts2018_e/wts 2018_e.pdf, abgerufen am 17 Dec 2018. Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 8

European International Political Theory as a New Critical Theory of World Politics: The Instructive Case of Jean Baudrillard Spiros Makris

Abstract In this chapter, I examine the influence of Continental Philosophy in the remaking of IR theory into critically oriented European International Political Theory (EIPT). A pivotal role in this transformation has been played by the New Critical Theory drawing on psychoanalysis, semiology, post-Marxism, discourse analysis, post-structuralism, and postmodern theory. The work of Jean Baudrillard has had a major influence on this shift. Baudrillard suggests a new understanding of world politics in the twenty-first century based on the intellectual resources provided both by Continental Philosophy and New Critical Theory challenging the image of IR theory as an American achievement. Baudrillard’s continental philosophical insights could shed light on the diversity and interdisciplinary character of EIPT.

S. Makris (B) University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Paipais (ed.), Perspectives on International Political Theory in Europe, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77274-1_8

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Keywords Baudrillard · Hegemony · Global power · America · Europe

Baudrillard and the Critical Theories of International Relations Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) could be considered as a new critical theorist of global politics to the extent that in his work and since America and the mid-1980s, he has theorised the relations between Europe, America, and the rest of the world. As such, he could be counted as a major influence on those new critical theorists within the intellectual ranks of the European traditions of International Political Theory (IPT) (Jørgensen et al., 2017), especially those articulated around post-structuralism, postcolonialism, theories of globalisation, cultural studies, and ecocriticism. James Der Derian, Timothy Luke, and Cynthia Weber represent some of the eminent critical international relations thinkers who have drawn their inspiration from Baudrillard’s work (Debrix, 2009: 54–65). This chapter will argue that Baudrillard’s new critical theory of world politics could be seen as an effort to create a radical framework of analysis of global power in the twenty-first century (Keucheyan, 2013: 57–58). Baudrillard’s late quasi-trilogy: Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared, Carnival and Cannibal and the Agony of Power, constitute a comprehensive approach to global politics. Even though he rejected the traditional critical theory (Devetak, 2018), Baudrillard refigured critical thought under the aegis of Pataphysics in the sense of a hypercritical thought (Baudrillard, 2004a: 9). Luke is among the first who stressed Baudrillard’s notion of global politics as a new power space in late capitalism (Luke, 1994: 613–628). Luke emphasises the fact that Baudrillard not only paves the way for a post-realist approach to international politics, but he also challenges Eurocentrism by shifting the power game onto the global level. Even though he speaks as a European, he deconstructs the realist discourse of territoriality by bringing to the fore the problématique of globalisation. By using the conceptual armory of Continental Philosophy and New Critical Theory, Baudrillard adds to the European outlook on international relations to the perspective of global politics. For Luke, Baudrillard belongs to these new critical theorists who showed how the

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realistic image of a state-centric modernity is transformed into a hyperrealist space of global power in postmodernity (Luke, 1991: 353; Walters, 2012). For Der Derian, Baudrillard provides the theory of International Relations with a constructive exodus from geopolitics opening up the space of chronopolitics, where globalisation is perceived as a simulated expression of world politics and where realism is tuned into hyperrealism (Der Derian, 1990: 299–303). Cochran claims that Derrida, Baudrillard, and Barthes gave new life to the theory of International Relations by inspiring a new generation of international relations theorists, such as R. Ashley, R. B. J. Walker, W. Connolly, M. Shapiro, and J. George to push political realism towards a reflexive self-deconstruction after the end of Cold War, putting emphasis on the concepts of global politics, metaphysics, terrorism, virtual reality, and TV war games (Cochran, 1995: 237–238). The argument of this chapter, concerning Baudrillard’s contribution to EIPT (Der Derian, 2001; Der Derian & Shapiro, 1989; Weber, 2010), is articulated as follows: The first section is focused on Baudrillard’s theory of global politics as a theory of hegemony in late modernity (Weber, 1995: 128–129). Baudrillard here enriches realist insights on the distribution of state power with a post-structural theory of globalisation, where world politics is regarded as an Integral Reality simulated in its hidden self: i.e. International Terrorism (Der Derian, 2009: 68–96). The second section demonstrates how he pushes cultural analysis into its limits: the Americanisation of globalisation is perceived as the semiological redoubling of modernity within the reversibility between Europe and America (Luke, 2002: 153–157). The third section brings to light his post-colonial rhetorical strategy by deconstructing the discursive binary of “the West and the Rest” image through an anthropological theorisation of Western orgy (Debrix, 2015; Debrix & Weber, 2003). In the final section, I provide an analysis of Baudrillard’s late approach on the agony of global power. The latter could be seen as a reformulation of the realist theory of power politics into a theory of global power as a self-catastrophic process, disclosing the image of an ecological dystopia (Featherstone, 2011; Luke, 1997: 196).

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From Domination to Hegemony or a Pataphysical Theory of World Politics Europe is a caricature of global power. (Baudrillard, 2010a: 54)

The central idea of Baudrillard’s theory of global politics is that of hegemony (Baudrillard, 2010a: 33). Baudrillard places the onto-theological break of neocapitalism within a power context that is characterised by the transformation of domination into a hyperreal global hegemony. This is a key image of international relations in late modernity that must be understood in relation to his entire oeuvre if we are to grasp how he interprets the nature of politics in the era of globalisation. This new critical theory of world politics in the twenty-first century must be regarded as a pataphysical style of analysis which is, actually, Baudrillard’s instructive contribution not only to the making of a radical social thought but also to the understanding of the complexity of the hegemonic power relations in the era of world politics (Baudrillard, 2004a: 19). In Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared, he sums up this new metaphysics of global politics in the sense of a new image of the world (Baudrillard, 2009a: 39). He couples this image with the human brain in the technological form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that has been expanding across the world as the reigning hegemony in the global geopolitical sphere. Global politics seems like a pyramidal synthesis of power through a circulated system of digital networks, i.e. the pixelisation of power as the subjection of the whole world to a single programme or the subjection of all singularities to a single genome (Baudrillard, 2009a: 44, 61). Baudrillard claims that Integral Reality of global power, i.e. the hyperreality of global politics, aims at the homogenisation of the world wiping out every radical otherness (Baudrillard, 2009a: 64; 1993a: 111). It is worth noting that passive consensus and the complicity of silent masses in the era of globalisation must be perceived as the fundamental attribute of hegemony in contrast with the characteristic of agonism in the era of domination. Hegemony is a new kind of extraterritorial sovereignty, where the basic feature of the world system is that of circulated demonic images as they are exponentially unfolding in the global field of digital networks that Baudrillard defines as simulacra. This is the new form of the intelligence of Evil. For him, this is the cold revenge coming from the side

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of objects themselves against the subject (Baudrillard, 1990a: 137). Hegemony is compared with a masquerade, full of obscenity and mockery, which hegemonises the world through carnivalisation and cannibalisation. Conventional power has come to an end. Global power signifies a liquidation of every value. It is only the parody of power. Baudrillard describes this pataphysical image as “the hegemony of masquerade, and the masquerade of hegemony” (Baudrillard, 2010a: 33–35). Baudrillard defines globalisation as the hegemony of virtual reality. Everything has been emptied of its meaning and has been turned into a simulation. The Western masquerade relies on this accelerated liquidation of the Real through globally circulated signs and images (Baudrillard, 2017: 27–28). In the era of global power, both negativity and critical thought are perceived as obsolete. Everybody is hostage to the power of digital networks. Capitalism has lost its conventional nature having transformed into a global market of generalised exchange. For Baudrillard, this process signifies the consumption of reality. He describes this condition as turbo-capitalism (Baudrillard, 2010a: 61; Makris, 2018). By dissolving the reality principle, hyperreality is developed into an Integral Reality that absorbs every singularity. The global hegemony of power is totalitarian. Nobody can escape from it. It works by stretching the fatal techniques of irony, mockery, and masquerade to their limits. The global system appears entrapped into a paradoxical onto-theology of self-sacrifice. Technocratic cynicism leads everything into the mouth of Evil. Evil is the hegemon. Evil itself is seen as a ventriloquist entity that speaks for itself. In many ways, Baudrillard constructs an image of the global power that seems like the Freudian uncanny. The intelligence of Evil can be regarded as an ironic self-catastrophe. It looks as if Baudrillard opts for this primitive technique of self-sacrifice as a tragic method of self-catharsis. For the new critical theory of power, the system is self-redeemed via its self-destruction (i.e. implosion). It seems as though melancholy haunts the global hegemony of Western modernity. Capital, power, and metaphysics have been transformed into a self-sacrificial illusion. The whole thing looks like a triumphant Western end, however it is nothing but the banal illusion of the end of history (Baudrillard, 1994). Baudrillard characterises this process towards the global hegemony of power in the twenty-first century as Western millenarianism (Baudrillard, 1994, 2000). The hegemonic sphere of hyperreality has absorbed the images of value, representation, and metaphysical reality. Western globalisation corresponds to a paroxysmal saturation of power which leads

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via virtual excess to the deregulation of every capitalist value, democratic system, and referential reality. It is within this framework that he places international terrorism as the counter-gift to the gift of White terror. It is noteworthy that he includes Europe within the same system by claiming that she is nothing but a caricature of global power (Baudrillard, 2010a: 36–56).

The Californication of Power: America as Original Modernity Everything that disappears in Europe is born again in San Francisco. (Baudrillard, 1988: 57)

It would be ill-advised to discuss Baudrillard’s social onto-theology and the way he interprets the historical process of Western civilisation prior to addressing how he reads America as a material and cultural phenomenon. His critical project is indeed focused on the analysis of America. This must not be perceived as a depreciation of “Europe” but as his intention to analyse it through the hyperreal experience of the New World. America must be regarded as the culmination of Europe. For Baudrillard, the failure of Western modernity is mitigated by the success of the New World. America is the utopia achieved (Baudrillard, 1988: 77). America is the realisation of simulation: the land of hyperreality. It could be said that the U.S. is perceived as the ideal type of Western modernity. Within the American idyllic context, one discovers all the Good and Evil aspects of Western civilisation as turbo-capitalism. His masterpiece America stands out not only as a poetic approach of U.S. in the era of Reaganism but also as a turning point in his social thought to the extent that in this text one finds prefigured the elements of a holistic account of the nature of power in the era of globalisation. From the mid-1980s until his late works, Baudrillard, as is also the case with Foucault and Derrida (Makris, 2015), is transformed into a new critical thinker of global power with America representing the ideal signifier. If there is a paradox behind his new critical theory is that, unlike for mainstream EIPT, globalisation symbolises the end of U.S. domination. It could be asserted that from Reagan to Trump, American power is nothing but the expression of an implosion. However, his argument is not a typical

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one when it comes to the prospects of global politics in the future to come. In fact, he analyses America by using the conceptual edifice of simulation. American utopia signifies the emergence of power effect in the globalisation era. According to this thesis, power is impotent in the era of global politics (Baudrillard, 1988: 107). The ideal type of this simulated global power is California. The californication of global power is the ideal type of power not only of the U.S. but of Western late modernity itself. Politics is transformed into showbiz. America’s utopia is presented as a millenarian event. Baudrillard approaches global power through the project of American onto-theology. The prophecy of an idealised world has been achieved in this magic land of the New World. Everything here is positive and perfect. Behind the image of simulated power both poverty and unhappiness have miraculously disappeared. For Baudrillard, the U.S. is the realisation of a hyperbole (Baudrillard, 1988: 114). Reagan and Trump display the features of simulated global power: apathy, inertia, stagnation, and hysteresis. “Indeed”, he claims, “Reagan is a sort of fantastic specimen of the obscene transparence of power and politics, and of its insignificance at the same time. It’s as if everyone has become aware of the indifference of power to its own decisions, which is nothing but the indifference of the people themselves to their own representation, and thus to the whole representative system” (Baudrillard, 2003: 163). The American power machine has collapsed but nobody can see it due to hysteresis. Here Baudrillard plays with the etymological meaning of the word by bringing to light the problem of Western arrogance and hysteria. By so doing, Baudrillard challenges the American hegemony itself. It is worth noting that this is not a result of the emergence of a counter-hegemony but because of the crisis of American power, which is culminated as a condition of inertia. For Baudrillard, in the globalisation era, either American or Western power must be seen as a power in vacuum (Baudrillard, 1988: 116). As with the Covid-19 pandemic, it could be claimed that in Baudrillard’s terms Western world has lost its immunity. It is a world without negativity which is condemned to die by implosion. So, Western euphoria after the orgy of postwar capitalism is not but a carnivalistic facade which hysterically hides the metaphysical decay of Western democracies. For those who are familiar with his ironic prose, it is hard to discern Baudrillard’s intention behind his analysis of America, California, and global power. However, it must be attributed to his parodic style that he reads social facts by deconstructing the meaning of modern concepts.

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Often one has the feeling that he admires the American way of life as the realisation of simulation and hyperreality. These are the moments when he perceives America as a pure event, a Nietzschean beyond Good and Evil. For him, America represents the ideal image of modernity (Baudrillard, 1988: 76). American Protestantism is considered as a source of radicality, obscenity, conformism, and excess. He likens America to a coup de théâtre (Baudrillard, 1988: 78–79), a holy land of simulation: i.e. a new reality more real than the reality of Europe. This is actual modernity: a fictional world full of advertising and lifestyles. America’s oddness is realised in an objective ironic madness that governs the things themselves. The American power effect paves the way for transpolitics. The power of excess leads everything to the condition of indifference. For Baudrillard, America has the meaning of a postmodern Apocalypse that seems like a science fiction. American modernity is culminated in an orgy of power. This is the tipping point of Western civilisation. California symbolises the apex of promiscuity. The orgy of liberation reveals the Evil genius of modernity (Baudrillard, 1988: 97). Utopia is turned into dystopia. The orgiastic play of demonic images transforms American paradise into an exceptional barbarism. He characterises America as a desert (Baudrillard, 1988: 99). California shines like the fictional ornament of American postmodernity: a hyperreal landscape full of narcissism, criminality, and digital technology. California is the ideal metonym of postmodern hysteria. Baudrillard sees California as the hysterical face of Western death per se. This paradoxical orgy of global power is transformed into a meaningless madness. California must be perceived as the mirror of allegorical decadence: a decadence that is not decadent but the hyper-sign of a suicidal hyperreality. American power brings to the fore the existential limit of global politics in the era of turbo-capitalism. Western civilisation confronts a hazardous wave of conformism, pornography, and terrorism that stems from the obscured basement of modernity. America looks like a Minotaur that is ready to devour itself. California signals the digital exhilaration of obscenity, global power, and simulation. What is really striking in Baudrillard’s image of international relations in twenty-first century is that he refigures conventional EIPT (Willis, 2019: 96–98) by using as an ideal type the californication of global politics. He prepares us for the advent of a New World Order where everything measures its authenticity and quality through the American way of life. One has the impression that Tarantino’s filmography is

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a cinematic imitation of Baudrillard’s new critical theory of world politics. In the epicentre of this project, he puts America as the holy land of hyperreality (Baudrillard, 1988: 28). America is the simulation itself. It is a hologram that every part of it contains the meaning of the whole. In fact, America denotes the culmination of Western orgy at the moment when this existential problem is becoming the problem of the world as a whole (Baudrillard, 1988: 30). This orgiastic cannibalism tends to a hyperreal Apocalypse. In the seabed of this ecstatic metamorphosis of the world in the era of globalisation rest the cryogenised emotions of voidness and indifference. The Machiavellian smile of neocapitalist orgy must be seen as the metonymy of transparency and nullity. The New World suffers from an ineradicable solitude and a narcissistic hedonism (Baudrillard, 1988: 34–35). Baudrillard foresees the transformation of global politics into an enormous digital screen where media, videos, computers, and images create a new international spectrum full of artificial events. Everything now is a simulacrum. Global power itself is a hyperreal virtual and digital effect. States and wars are now expressions of a global closed circuit consisting of post-orgy electronic waves. In this post-orgy scenery, American foreign policy looks like a global Halloween: a sarcastic festival of digital masks (Baudrillard, 1988: 48). In this respect, America paves the way for the Transparency of Evil and, furthermore, for the Carnival and Cannibal where late Baudrillard grants his image of world politics a systematic pataphysical form.

From Orgy to Masquerade Ball or from Cannibalism to Carnivalism Terrorism in all its forms is the transpolitical mirror of evil. (Baudrillard, 1993a: 81)

According to Baudrillard, postwar orgiastic capitalism manifests the apotheosis of human body (sexuality), freedom (politics), and art (aesthetics). If so, the crucial question is as follows: what happens after the orgy? Raising this question, Baudrillard opens up the field of hyperreality in the era of global politics (Baudrillard, 1993a: 3). If we see his approach as a refiguration of the traditional content of EIPT, then it could be said that it shifts from an image of interstate relations to a new critical theory

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of globalisation, where global power is governed by the American cultural imperialism. This kind of homogenisation is fatal for Western democratic societies to the extent that such a harmonisation of global politics is based on the violent extermination of radical otherness. The post-orgy world is a one-dimensional or transparent world without depth and diversity. Baudrillard describes this onto-theological mutation of the world as a “trans” condition where the silent and mass indifference of transpolitics dominates. This New World Order is likened to a cancer metastasis. Foreseeing, through AIDS and cancer, the Covid-19 phase of global politics, he reads globalisation as a state of a global virulence. The paradox with this epidemiological metaphor is that the mutation is taking place in a situation of a plasmatic immunity. The global world of simulation and digital images looks like a closed and deserted world. But this is not true. The problem with this post-orgy global world is located in an idealised perfectionism that has emerged as a demonic play of obesity, obscenity, and excess (Baudrillard, 1993a: 8). Baudrillard describes the globalisation era using the umbrella term of transpolitics and talking about the figures of the transpolitical (Baudrillard, 1990a: 25). It could be said that transpolitics is the politics in the postmodern condition, but it is not that simple. Since 1970s, Baudrillard systematically builds a theory of power in late capitalism where the political is transformed into the transpolitical (Baudrillard, 2007a). In fact, transpolitics consists in the paradoxical and explosive combination of ecstasy and inertia. In the era of global politics, turbo-capitalism is taking place through an acceleration culminating in a situation of stagnation (Baudrillard, 1990a: 7). He defines the whole process by using the poetic term implosion. He believes that this is not a cyclical crisis of capitalism but a point of no return, a cancer metastasis, where the site of politics is seen as the site of Western self-catastrophe on a global scale. The transpolitical denotes the end of the social and the advent of silent masses on the global scene (Baudrillard, 2007b). Everything becomes transparent and obscene. Transparency and obscenity govern every human activity. Since 9/11, he determines the transpolitical by analysing in-depth the phenomenon of terrorism (Baudrillard, 2004b, 2012; Makris, 2020). World power and international terrorism are taken to be the two faces of global terror. The spirit of global politics includes the spirit of global terror. He does not identify terrorism with religious fundamentalism, rather he tries to explore terrorism as the alter ego of

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Western modernity (Baudrillard, 2012). Drawing his inspiration from a Manichean Nietzsche, he believes that the solution to the riddle of the suicidal character of global politics can be found in the principle of Evil. For him, Evil is not the opposite of Good but the other face of Good in the globalisation era. It is impossible to grasp the onto-theology of international relations in the twenty-first century, if we fail to detect this ventriloquist aspect of global politics (Baudrillard, 1990a: 181). Baudrillard prepares his social onto-theology of global politics through an analysis of power itself in his seminal work Forget Foucault at the end of 1970s. For him, power is not an institutional synecdoche of politics but a catastrophic and stupid process of Western modernity per se. Power is not an aspect of the Real but a process of hyperreal towards the end of the Real and power itself. Transpolitics symbolises the selfcatastrophic end of power (Baudrillard, 2007a: 45). In this vein, he emerges as a critical post-metaphysician of power. Power is something more and above the reality principle that has the monstrous strength to destroy and vanish everything. Power has the last word (Baudrillard, 2007a: 50). Baudrillard claims that power is the appeal of seduction itself that runs into a reversible cycle, i.e. the reversibility principle as destiny (Baudrillard, 1990b: 179). Like post-foundational theories of the political (Marchart, 2007), Baudrillard poses underneath power the chaotic but ironically creative powers of death and voidness (Baudrillard, 2007a: 54). He likens power to pornography as a delirious desire for self-catastrophe (Baudrillard, 2007a: 65). Power either as an ironic scenario of self-catastrophe or as a redemptive fatal strategy or as a parodic destiny of Western modernity haunts his onto-theology of global politics. He approaches global power as a global virulence, a global infection that threatens West-led globalisation. Covid-19 should be seen as another fatal expression of this global game of viruses that characterises the expansion of turbo-capitalism on a worldwide scale (Baudrillard, 1993a: 37). In this perspective, the global system tends to be internationally terroristic. In the age of hypermodernity, the highest stage of virulence could be seen in the form of a pandemic terror. Transpolitics is the reality of a terroristic hyperrealism. Baudrillard puts the power of digital screens at the epicentre of global transpolitics (Baudrillard, 1993a: 75–80). He finds the violence of the global system summarised in the 9/11 event and the spirit of terrorism whose image is apocalyptic. “More than violence”,

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he writes, “indeed, we should speak of virulence. This violence is viral: it operates by contagion, by chain reaction, and it gradually destroys all our immunities and our power to resist” (Baudrillard, 2012: 72). The global system exterminates every singularity by imposing a double-faced Empire where Evil emerges as the ironic and fatal face of Good. So, global politics is transformed into a parodic self-condemnation (Baudrillard, 2012: 77–78). More specifically, global politics is perceived as a game between the fatal conditions of carnivalism and cannibalism. Baudrillard uses the anthropological edifice of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille in order to refigure EIPT into a new critical theory of global politics where the concepts of magic, sacrifice, gift, counter-gift, obscenity, excess, symbolic exchange, materiality and the accursed share dominate (Smith, 2010: 5, 24, 65, 85, 120, 144). In Carnival and Cannibal, he tries to give his theory of global politics and Evil a systematic form. By following in Marx’s footsteps, he approaches Western modernity as a tragedy which, by expanding on a planetary scale, is transformed into a farce. He likens modernity to a process of carnivalisation which unfolds through the phases of evangelisation, colonisation, decolonisation, and globalisation. At the heart of this Western masquerade ball across the globe, he poses a fatal process of a double-faced cannibalisation where the cannibal (i.e. the coloniser in a broad sense) is cannibalised by his former victims. This is a process of reversibility where the roles are exchangeable. In anthropological terms, the history of modernity from colonisation to globalisation is conceived as a symbolic exchange of gifts and counter-gifts. He interprets international terrorism either as a countergift or as a sacrificial death for the gift of White terror. This paradoxical and self-catastrophic reversion of global politics brings to the fore the fatal character of power itself. Cannibalism is defined as a strange form of hospitality (Baudrillard, 2012: 144) where both host and the guest devour each other in an orgiastic masquerade ball. Everything is pushed to extremes. Losing their specific identities, things are transformed into spectralities. Baudrillard approaches global politics, and by extension the game of global power, within the dialectical frame of a Hegel-driven duality, i.e. master and servant, where this fatal carnivalesque and cannibalistic form of Western globalisation devours the whole world (Baudrillard, 2010b: 3–6).

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Both European imperialism and Western hegemony are regarded as a self-sacrificial carnival or as a grotesque performance of redoubling on a global scale. Baudrillard claims that when the principles of democracy and human rights are exported to the global level via the vehicle of universality, they are revealed as mockery. This is the moment in which modernity takes a fatal and self-sacrificial character. The expansive logic of Western modernity leads to a cannibalistic homogenisation that exterminates every vestige of radical otherness. This excessive obscenity of Western civilisation, which is obvious in the way that America sacrifices its black population by using the racist weapon of police brutality, reveals itself as a global parody of digital caricatures and masks. Global politics turns into a mechanism of simulation where mimetic violence dominates. It is developed as a lethal game of crystal revenge and exchangeable death. Globalisation is nothing but this worldwide farce consisting of the twin faces of carnival and cannibal. In this context, Baudrillard speaks about a stupidity that deeply governs the global system of hegemony (Baudrillard, 2010b: 7–14). He is not talking only about leadership, but he also refers to a silent multitude which selects its leaders based only on criteria of banality and conformism. For him, the question of global power can be resolved not by refusing “to be dominated” but by abolishing the stupidity “to dominate”. This could be a real revolution. By parodying the role of idols and fans in politics, he claims that the dominance of simulacra in the game of global hegemony could be regarded as a fatal game of carnivalisation of image and of self-cannibalisation by image. He sees the apotheosis of the californication of power in the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger to the office of Governor of California. This is the moment of American Apocalypse. This extreme mockery, that is revealed as a paradoxical American political onto-theology, full of obscenity, impiety, and vulgarity, explains the secret of global hegemony: everyone is held spellbound by this magical zero degree of culture where power is nothing but a masquerade ball which is imposed on the Rest of the world as a cannibalistic orgy. “Global power”, he sums up, “is the power of the simulacrum, of a universal carnivalization, which the West imposes at the cost of its own humiliation, its own symbolic mutilation. Challenge against challenge” (Baudrillard, 2010b: 15–24).

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Outro: The Agony of Global, Universal, and the Spectre of Europe America is, in concrete form, the traumatic consequence of European dreams. (Baudrillard, 2009b: 97)

Baudrillard describes the fatal strategy of global politics in the era of turbo-capitalism as the agony of power. It is a historical era of an enormous, simulated acceleration around the world, through mutilated bodies, digital money, commodity signs, and electronic screens (Baudrillard, 2010a). This is, in fact, the title of a small but rich book that includes Baudrillard’s late texts on the problématique of global politics. In this, he summarises his theory on power and Evil, not only in the globalisation era but in the wider period of Western modernity. Global power or the power of the West, where America is its retroactive archetype, must be seen only as the original source of global terror. For Baudrillard, international terrorism is nothing but the ugly face of White Terror (Baudrillard, 2010a: 59). By eliminating and humiliating the values of democracy, freedom, and human rights, through carnivalisation and cannibalisation, the West has prepared its own material and symbolical death. In fact, it is absolutely powerless. Baudrillard builds an approach of global power via a quasi-Manichean theory of Good and Evil (Smith, 2010: 115–117). Evil is nothing but the hubris of Good. Evil is considered as the excessive and arrogant apex of Good. The irony consists in the fact that Evil is taking place in the name of Good. Good is presented as a self-destructive entity. This is the fatal destiny of global power: the destiny of a power that cannibalises and devours itself. Contrary to the concept of domination, which is characterised by the attributes of alienation and revolution, the contemporary form of global power is that of hegemony and involution. Hegemony is characterised by the elements of saturation, vertigo, emptiness, and devaluation. Hegemony is the transpolitical face of Integral Reality which operates like a black hole: it devours everything. This approach of global politics can be regarded as an expression of an anti-foundational social theory that draws its inspiration from a philosophical thought that extends from Heidegger to Castoriadis. In the era of global power, there are no longer masters and slaves. In this void of

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referents and meanings, everybody is an accomplice. In a Nietzschean way, Baudrillard claims that in this fatal game of global power there is no easy way out. We are all hostages in a fatal game of disappearance. The whole system seems like a turbo machine that leads everything to saturation and liquidation. The loss of modern values signifies the emergence of a new era in which the power of self-devourment reigns (Baudrillard, 2010a: 109–123). He defines this process of reversibility as the perfect crime. In this global crime, there is no perpetrator, victim, evidence, or motive (Baudrillard, 1996: 1). Behind the emergence of global power, Baudrillard foresees the obsolescence of human beings themselves. This self-catastrophic process signifies the emergence of an anthropological break that is conceived as catastrophe management (Baudrillard, 1994: 66). Contrary to the apologists of AI, he claims that this global expansion of virtual technology brings to the fore the totalitarian abdication of human will. Hegemonic power must not be seen as the culmination of collective responsibility but as a sort of a postmodern embarrassment that signals the end of revolutionary impulse and critical thinking. Following in Camus’ footsteps (Camus, 2000: 29), he likens global power to a fatal metaphysical rebellion, where everything is governed by an implosive excess of obese profusion, unlimited progressivism, and vertiginous growth.

Europe and the End of Western Seduction Along with this science-fiction theory of an agony of global power, which leads humanity to a schizophrenic self-destruction (Baudrillard, 2010a: 79–90), he places a theory of the universal. The globalisation of platform capitalism destroys the values of democracy, freedom, and human rights. The promiscuity of the global turns universal values into a technological pornography of an abstract power and war (Baudrillard, 2002a: 155–159; 2005a). The phantoms of the vanished universal are stigmatised by the decay of Europe. Behind the electronic scene of a self-catastrophic global sphere and vanishing universe, he poses the fading phantasm of Europe. His image about international relations in the twenty-first century is haunted by the spectre of a simulated Europe that watches herself in the digital screens of the global system (Baudrillard, 2002b: 524). In this global system, where everything is upside down, Baudrillard approaches Europe as a simulated replica of the world power system. This globalised Europe has been constructed as a model of the American modernity

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(Baudrillard, 1993b: 245). Enlightenment has been replaced by the European Union (EU) which is nothing but a digital annexation: a screening of global power. He sees the EU as the exemplification of the liquidation of democratic representation (Baudrillard, 2005b). Behind European decadence, Baudrillard traces the end of the Western seduction itself. This is not a pessimistic remark because it opens up the potentialities for a mode of resistance (Baudrillard, 2006: 7). Inasmuch as “at the height of its hegemony, power cannibalizes itself” (Baudrillard, 2010a: 62), he sees in it the advent of a catharsis for the entire humanity. The thing looks like a redemptive work of mourning. If “global power is the power of the simulacrum”, then our destiny must be seen through the apotheosis of simulation itself (Baudrillard, 2010a: 66). Baudrillard builds his new critical theory of world politics as an onto-theology of the intelligence of Evil (Baudrillard, 2005c). The liquidation of every European and universal value on a global scale constitutes an ironic and paradoxical potlatch where Good and Evil are exchangeable via reversibility. International virulence comes to the fore as the millenarian moment of the primitive delirium of global. For Baudrillard, the vertigo of global hyperreality signals a turning point of White terror: it is the moment where the World Order is challenged by a potential revolt. Despite that his new critical theory of world politics is governed by a nihilistic mood, it is obvious that he is optimistic that a resurrection of negativity can create a glimmer of hope for a future to come (Baudrillard, 2010a: 76; Makris, 2021).

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Baudrillard, J. (2002b). Europe, globalization and the destiny of culture. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(4): 521–530 (M. Sassatelli, Trans.). Baudrillard, J. (2003). Baudrillard live: Selected interviews (M. Gane, Ed.). Routledge. Baudrillard, J. (2004a). Fragments: Conversations with François L’Yvonnet (C. Turner, Trans.). Routledge. Baudrillard, J. (2004b). The Gulf War did not take place (P. Patton, Trans.). Power Publications. Baudrillard, J. (2005a). Pornography of war. Cultural Politics, 1(1), 23–26 (C. Turner, Trans.). Baudrillard, J. (2005b). Holy Europe. New Left Review, 33, 24–25. Baudrillard, J. (2005c). The intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact (C. Turner, Trans.). Berg. Baudrillard, J. (2006). The pyres of autumn. New Left Review, 37 , 5–7. Baudrillard, J. (2007a). Forget Foucault (N. Dufrense, Trans.). Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, J. (2007b). In the shadow of the silent majorities or the end of the social (P. Foss, J. Johnston, P. Patton, & A. Berardini, Trans.). Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, J. (2009a). Why hasn’t everything already disappeared (C. Turner, Trans.). Seagull Books. Baudrillard, J. (2009b). America after Utopia. New Perspectives Quarterly, 26(4), 96–99. Baudrillard, J. (2010a). The agony of power (A. Hodges, Trans.). Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, J. (2010b). Carnival and Cannibal (C. Turner, Trans.). Seagull Books. Baudrillard, J. (2012). The spirit of terrorism (C. Turner, Trans.). Verso. Baudrillard, J. (2017). The evil demon of images (P. Patton & P. Foss, Trans., p. 862). The Power Institute of Fine Arts. Camus, A. (2000). The rebel (A. Bower, Trans.). Penguin Books. Cochran, M. (1995). Postmodernism, ethics and international political theory. Review of International Studies, 21, 237–250. Debrix, F. (2009). Jean Baudrillard. In J. Edkins & N. Vaughan-Williams (Eds.), Critical theorists and international relations (pp. 54–65). Routledge. Debrix, F. (Ed.). (2015). Language, agency, and politics in a constructed world. Routledge. Debrix, F., & Weber, C. (Eds.). (2003). Rituals of mediation: International politics and social meaning. University of Minnesota Press. Der Derian, J. (1990). The (s)pace of international relations: Simulation, surveillance, and speed. International Studies Quarterly, 34, 295–310. Der Derian, J. (Ed.). (2001). International theory: Critical investigations. Palgrave. Der Derian, J. (2009). Critical practices in international theory: Selected essays. Routledge.

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Der Derian, J., & Shapiro, M. J. (Eds.). (1989). International/intertextual relations: Postmodern readings of world politics. Lexington Books. Devetak, R. (2018). Critical international theory: An intellectual history. Oxford University Press. Featherstone, M. (2011). Against the fake Empire: Utopia, Dystopia, Apocalypticism in Baudrillard’s late works. Cultural Politics, 7 (3), 465–476. Jørgensen, K. E., et al. (2017). Reappraising European IR theoretical traditions. Palgrave Macmillan. Keucheyan, R. (2013). The left hemisphere: Mapping critical theory today (G. Elliott, Trans.). Verso. Luke, T. W. (1991). Power and politics in hyperreality: The critical project of Jean Baudrillard. The Social Science Journal, 28(3), 347–367. Luke, T. W. (1994). Placing power/siting space: The politics of global and local in the New World Order. Society and Space, 12, 613–628. Luke, T. W. (1997). Ecocritique: Contesting the politics of nature, economy, and culture. University of Minnesota Press. Luke, T. W. (2002). Museum politics: Power plays at the exhibition. University of Minnesota Press. Makris, S. (2015). Jacques Derrida and the case of cosmopolitanism: ‘Cities of refuge’ in the twenty-first century. In D. O’Byrne & S. De La Rosa (Eds.), The cosmopolitan ideal: Challenges and opportunities (pp. 177–194). Rowman & Littlefield International. Makris, S. (2018). Masses, turbo-capitalism and power in Jean Baudrillard’s social and political ontotheology. International Journal of Theology, Philosophy and Science, 2(3), 91–112. Makris, S. (2020). The concept of terror in Jean Baudrillard’s social ontology. Dia-Noesis. A Journal of Philosophy, 8, 49–65. Makris, S. (2021). Politics of space, strangeness, and culture in the global age. In B. Axford, A. Brisbourne, S. Halperin, & C. Lueders (Eds.), Political sociologies of the cultural encounter: Essays on borders, cosmopolitanism and globalization (pp. 39–53). Routledge. Marchart, O. (2007). Post-foundational political thought: Political difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh Univeristy Press. Smith, R. G. (Ed.). (2010). The Baudrillard dictionary. Edinburgh University Press. Walters, J. (2012). Baudrillard and theology. T & T Clark International. Weber, C. (1995). Simulating sovereignty: Intervention, the state, and symbolic exchange. Cambridge University Press. Weber, C. (2010). International relations theory: A critical introduction (3rd ed.). Routledge. Willis, B. (2019). Reappraising European IR theoretical traditions. Global Affairs, 5(1), 96–98.

Index

A advocacy, 51, 52, 54 aesthetics, 4, 6, 8, 50–54, 58, 60–63, 137 America, 7, 8, 50, 70, 76, 89, 94, 115, 130, 131, 134–138, 141–143 Anti-Machiavellianism, 32 archaeology, 13, 14, 25 Aristotle, 95–101 artworks, 6, 52, 59, 60, 63 Augustine, 5, 14, 17, 19, 20, 115

B Barad, Karen, 50, 51, 63 Baudrillard, Jean, 7, 8, 130–144 Botero, Giovanni, 5, 32, 36–41 Bronstein, Pablo, 55, 56 Brown, Chris, 2–4, 7, 13, 51, 64, 72, 89, 94–98, 101

C Campanella, Tommaso, 32, 33 cannibalisation, 133, 140–142 carnivalisation, 133, 140–142 casuistry, 36, 43 chronopolitics, 7, 131 civic activism, 74, 79 civil society, 6, 68, 70, 72, 74, 75, 77–81 Cole, G.D.H., 6, 71–75, 77, 81 confessionalisation, 37 contemporary art, 6, 50–52, 54–57, 63, 64 cosmopolitan democracy, 68 cosmos, 5, 14–17, 22–24 Counter-Reformation, 32, 36, 40 creativity, 6, 23, 60, 62, 95 critical theory, 8, 108, 130, 132–134, 137, 140, 144 curation, 6, 60, 64

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Paipais (ed.), Perspectives on International Political Theory in Europe, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77274-1

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148

INDEX

D democratic peace, 6, 59, 69–71, 75–81 democratisation, 6, 68–71, 73–78, 80 Dewey, John, 7, 99–101

E Empire, 39, 58, 59, 140 epistemic violence, 5 eternal return of the same, 12, 15, 22–26 ethical competence, 92, 93 ethnocentrism, 57 Eurocentrism, 4, 5, 12, 89, 130 Europe, 4, 5, 30, 32, 35, 37, 42, 43, 68, 77, 80, 89, 117, 130, 131, 134, 136, 142, 143 Evil, 24, 30, 34, 43, 113, 132–134, 136, 139, 140, 142, 144

F feminism, 50, 51, 59, 63 Forensic Architecture, 52

G Gadamer, Hans Georg, 71, 76, 77 Giambrone, Silvia, 55, 56 globalisation, 3, 5, 8, 109, 130–135, 137–143

H Habermas, Juergen, 111, 121 hegemony, 4, 8, 131–133, 135, 141, 142, 144 Heidegger, Martin, 12–14, 22, 25, 142 Hobbes, Thomas, 40, 41, 62 Hobhouse, L.T., 6, 71, 73, 75, 76, 81

horizon of expectation, 6, 69, 71, 76, 81 humanism, 35–37 hyperreality, 7, 8, 132–134, 136, 137, 144

I idealism, 7, 38, 64, 71, 73, 76, 101, 102, 109–113, 124, 134–136, 138 injustice action-related, 7, 110, 116, 117, 122, 123 political, 110, 116, 118, 120–123 structural, 7, 53, 73, 81, 110, 114, 116–124 interest, 3, 13, 33, 34, 39–41, 43, 44, 53, 70, 74, 75, 77, 91, 94, 111, 113–115 International Practice Theory, 7, 88, 93, 102

J judgement, 7, 30, 33, 89, 92, 94–97, 99, 101, 118 justice, 3, 4, 7, 15, 34, 35, 41, 94, 108–116, 121–124

K Kurdi, Alan, 52

L liberalism, 58, 69–71, 75–77 Lipsius, Justus, 35–37, 41, 44 lived experience, 6, 53, 58, 60–62, 64, 117

INDEX

M Machiavellian, Machiavellianism, 32, 35–38, 137 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 5, 30–38, 40–42, 44 Medici de, Cosimo, 30 Meinecke, Friedrich, 5, 32, 35, 43, 44 metaphysics, 5, 12–14, 19, 22, 25, 26, 131–133, 135, 143 mirror for princes, 33, 37, 39 Mitrany, David, 6, 71, 72, 74–77, 80, 81 moral reasoning, 6, 33, 35, 95–97, 99 Morrison, Toni, 58 museums, 6, 50–54, 57–60, 63, 64 N nation, 41, 57, 69, 72, 81, 109, 124 natural law, 32, 40–42 necessity, 24, 33, 34, 36, 41, 63 negativity, 133, 135, 144 Nesbit, Molly, 63 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12–14, 20–26 nihilism, 21, 24 non-ideal theory, 7, 124 normativity, 7, 89, 91, 92, 98 O Obrist, Hans-Ulrich, 63 oligarchy, 69, 70, 73, 75, 78, 81 P pataphysics, 130, 132, 133, 137 Plato, 5, 12, 14, 16–21, 51, 91, 115 Platonism, 17, 19–22 Plotinus, 17–20 pluralism, 6, 69–72, 76, 77 political morality, 33, 34, 44 power, 7, 8, 31, 37–40, 56, 59, 63, 72, 73, 75, 79, 92, 96, 109, 111, 114, 118, 120–123, 130–144

149

practical judgement, 7, 89, 94–97, 100, 101 practice turn, 88–93, 97 prudence, 30, 34, 38, 39, 95 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 39, 40, 42 R Ratman, Gilad, 55, 56 Realpolitik, 31 reason of state, 5, 6, 31–33, 35–44 Reformation, 35, 37 S Said, Edward, 58, 64 Shklar, Judith, 7, 115–118 simulation, 133–138, 141, 144 Sissa, Giulia, 56 T Tiravanija, Ritkrit, 63 transnationalism, 70, 72, 76, 79, 81, 109 true world, 5, 12–22, 24–26 turbo-capitalism, 8, 133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 142 U universalism, 121 V violence, 35, 40, 42, 56, 101, 102, 116, 139–141 visual culture, 62 W Walcott, Derek, 58 Weber, Max, 5, 31, 32, 43, 44 Weiwei, Ai, 50, 52 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 98, 99, 101